2019-05-19: The Human Emotion of Lazing Around, Mui

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  • Log: The Human Emotion of Lazing Around, Mui
  • Cast: Kamui, Acacia Saitani
  • Where: Meria Boule
  • Date: 19th May 2019
  • Summary: A flashback to when Kamui first started living with Acacia.


<Pose Tracker> Kamui has posed.

Life comes at you fast, doesn't it, Acacia Saitani!

What turned out to be a promising lead to turn her finances around... wound up producing her a young girl who's definitely a robot who's hopping up and down calling her Master. Possessed with a curiosity not unlike that of any regular human child, Kamui's basically been adopted by the local streets of Meria Boule, playing ball (the ball is sometimes her head) with Tony, Scott, Tim and the rest of the Avengers, and getting spoiled by Marina and Ashley at the local bakery.

"I'm hooome," Kamui chirps, her mouth obviously half-stuffed with something as the scent of chocolate croissants wafts from the bag in her arm. She bobbles in, dressed in the simple gown that Acacia probably dressed her in because she was just a robot with a strange blue bodysuit and broken pieces of armor and mechanisms underneath.

And the giant gem on her chest, which seems to have eaten part of the dress so it can still present itself.

<Pose Tracker> Acacia Saitani has posed.

Given the way that Acacia acts most of the time - the degree to which her mind ticks over on articles to write and leads to follow - you could probably be forgiven for thinking that the reporter would be one of those sorts of people who throw themselves into their work and have a bare, empty apartment waiting for them back home. Like their souuul, and all that.

Quite the opposite, in this case. Acacia's apartment isn't large, but it is cozy, dominated by a kotatsu laid out in the centre of the main room. The heavy bookcase does hold a couple of folders worth of old newspapers, but it's more an eclectic mixture of reference material and rather a lot of light novels and what appears to be a bunch of old textbooks, rather more technical than most reading available in Meria Boule.

There's a couple of scented candles on a side table, a big stuffed hedgehog sat in the centre of the kotatsu, a lot of little woodworking pieces that Acacia's started to collect ever since coming to Meria Boule, some watercolours from a local artist she decided she liked hanging on the walls.

It's very obviously her space to relax when she's not working, the redhead being the sort of person to draw a clear line between the two states; she's kind of protective of that difference, to the point where she was a little hesitant to show Kamui her apartment on their first day back in the town.

Now, though...

A familiar dark jacket is hung up on the back of the front door. "Welcome baaack," Acacia chimes in answer before a yawn overtakes her. She's obviously not been home that long, stood up at the countertop that passes for a kitchen while she waits for the heater to warm up and the kettle to boil. When she turns to glance at Kamui she hesitates - and then snorts at the sight of the bag under Kamui's arm. "You know, you managed to start worming free food out of them a whole lot faster than I did. Want a cocoa?" she offers as she wags a mug.

<Pose Tracker> Kamui has posed.

Kamui's unsettling camera eye zooms left and right over the apartment, comfortably putting the croissants down on the kotatsu and slinking down towards the table to snuggle in on it. "hmmmm...." she muses rather cozily, and then hears the kettle start boiling.

"What's a cocoa," the girl asks. ... really?

It's rather obvious the mysterious Reploid has... a ppppppretty large gap of knowledge of mundane topics, but she seems to be so eager to learn.

<Pose Tracker> Acacia Saitani has posed.

In many ways, the Reploid girl is a huge mystery to the reporter. Were it any other situation, any other story, she'd be trying to unravel that mystery - pick apart at it until she can catch a thread to pull upon - but it's something she can't really bring herself to do here, at least not so soon or so suddenly. Between Kamui's wide-eyed curiosity and an odd sense of protectiveness she can't seem to shake, Acacia's reluctant to disrupt the way they're learning to live around each other.

(Besides, she's nowhere near that hard-boiled when it really comes down to it. The fat stuffed toy had been tucked away in a box before Kamui came along, she's pulled out the winter blanket a few months early, and the bookcase has been reorganized to make a Kamui Shelf.)

She blinks at the question for a moment, her eyebrows raising - but whatever she was about to exclaim in response is cut off as the kettle starts to whistle, and she moves it off the heat before fishing through the cupboard. "Oh, I bought some while I was out, figured you'd like it." A pause, and she looks up to frown at the ceiling. "It's like chocolate you can drink, I guess?"

Before long, the redhead is carrying two cups over to the table, setting them down as she works her legs under the blanket. Her own smells a lot sharper, mixed with coffee; she pauses as she stares at it, wondering what to do for dinner before giving in and snagging the edge of the paper bag Kamui brought in to drag it towards her. "Did you find anything fun today?" she encourages, and then snickers as she wags a doughnut. "Aside from these."

<Pose Tracker> Kamui has posed.

Kamui has managed to sneak the hedgehog into her lap and is fussing over it for a moment. She doesn't seem to have asked Acacia whether or not it has a name, but she seems to just be content cuddling over it.

Kamui seems to have also populated the item with several miscellaneous trinkets she picked up from Meria Boule. A good number of it was just trash she found on the street and had to be told off and dispose of it cause it's stinky, but amongst the winners are things she brought back from her mysterious ruin:

A blue can marked with an 'E' on it.

(There's a joke here that the localisers struggled with where Kamui gets asked what it does, and she says the E-can is for when 'ikan!' situations arise. E can do it, translators.)

"Chocolate... that you can..."

Eyes widen.

The camera eye unfocuses.

"Drink..."

She seems to have travelled to Elysium for a moment.

Not the literal one, if it still exists in this MUSH. That'd be weird and premature.

She blinks and returns back to Earth. "I played ball with Tony and Scott...!"

<Pose Tracker> Acacia Saitani has posed.

Acacia... hasn't volunteered a name for the hedgehog, either. She does have the occasional lapse in good sense, and it's entirely possible she bought it without ever even thinking about anything more than 'cuddle' and 'round'.

When Kamui had started to decorate it, she'd made the decision to try to head the other girl off before she brought anything too unpleasant home - which is when Kamui first got introduced to the local lanes and the collection of tiny old second-hand stores within. At least it explained where she got most of her own decorations from.

The redhead leans on one arm, watching Kamui react to her explanation with an amused smile playing at her lips. The doughnut she snagged is already half-eaten as her body reminds her it's pretty much the first thing she's had all day, if you don't count the breakfast she habitually has on the go. "Well, kind of. See what you think. I put a bit of spice in it too," she adds as she nudges the second cup over, then wraps her hands around her own for the warmth.

The first sip makes her let out a relieved sigh, and it finally looks like she's actually 'at home', sagging in her seat as she burrows under the kotatsu a little more. "Did they actually use a ball this time?" she huffs past a wry grin, a little worried about whether she'd be able to fix Kamui if something happened. "You scared the life out of that guard the other day."

<Pose Tracker> Kamui has posed.

The fact that Kamui doesn't seem to understand that, say, an old shoe with a busted sole isn't anything interesting and should be thrown into the bin is perhaps a very curious part of herself too. Or a half-eaten can of baked beans, two weeks old, or...

...

She's very dog-like in that manner, isn't she? Look, Master, I brought something else home with me...

Kamui siiips at the cup for a moment, and you can kind of see the moment she goes from 'ooh' to 'OOOOH'.

yurucamp.gif:

"... so, this is the human invention of drinkable chocolate. It's amazing, mui..."

A pause.

"I didn't use my head as the ball this time, muiii," Kamui proudly reports like she's done a good. "I don't get why the guard was so upset."

<Pose Tracker> Acacia Saitani has posed.

Acacia looks a little far off herself, having her own 'ooh' moment - though for her it's more like neatly packing away the events of the day into the back of her mind, setting them aside for later. She'll have to check in with the printer tomorrow, get her draft together and lay it out properly, check if the bakery wants to keep running its advert - but that can wait, and she closes her eyes for an instant as she lets the thought go.

Besides, interrupting Kamui's moment of reverence doesn't seem right.

"I'll make sure we keep some around, then," she snorts after the Reploid has blobbed out, before a thought bubbles up. "And if you'd like, I can show you how to make it later." Testing Kamui's memory around the kitchen might be a bad idea, but as suggestions go it is at least a genuine one. More genuine than she expected, in fact; she's caught herself doing that a lot around Kamui the past few days.

She's too relaxed and comfortable to really grouse at the other girl, so instead she just smirks, and goes for the diplomatic and technically true answer. "Well-- he just didn't know anyone else who can detach their head. So he was surprised, that's all. He's one of the really uptight ones anyways," she adds, folding her arms and looking a little sour before she blinks. "--oh-- did you go climbing on the church again?"

<Pose Tracker> Kamui has posed.

Kamui has been pretty much a non-entity in the kitchen in the first few times Acacia's tried to teach her, between mistaking a bubbling kettle for some kind of enemy and having to be stopped from shooting it, to thinking that the fire on the gas stove is something she needs to jump over (if only she had Item-2...!)...

"I'll rely on Master's care," Kamui answers instead.

There it is again. 'Master'. But the way she says it, it never sounds that subservient or obedient... it sounds much more in the exact way a child would call her 'mother'. Happy and affectionate and a little sleepy and dream-like.

'Master is Master,' she would say cyclically if asked about it.

"Hmm... I'll have to teach him the wonders of detachable heads," Kamui muses. That might also be a terrible idea. "Oh... hmm. Yes, I climbed the Sword-Magess Cathedral steeple. It was very high. And..."

She lowers her head.

"Very sad."

<Pose Tracker> Acacia Saitani has posed.

That's something that Acacia's definitely yet to get used to; she catches herself a little at the term 'Master', instinctively feeling--

--she doesn't really know. She's loath to think of herself as anyone's owner; she's not that kind of person, or at least she'd certainly like to think she's not that kind of person. But when it's less a rank and more a security blanket for Kamui, that's a whole other question entirely. In the end, it seems to soothe the Reploid, and she's already learnt that arguing over it is rather fruitless.

The rest of the doughnut has already vanished; she's more hungry than she thought she was, licking at her fingers briefly as she watches Kamui across the table. "You can try, but I'm not sure he's got that capability. Not many people do," she drawls back, before mistaking the other girl's silence for a pause. "Well-- you're not in trouble, but the priest wanted a word. He was thinking of opening up the tower to visitors, so some shots from up there--"

'Very sad.'

Pulling herself up short, she blinks across the table at Kamui. It's not really a reaction that she expected, and it takes a moment for her mouth to work. "Yeah?" she offers, sensing it might be best to soften her voice. Her curiosity might be burning, but there's concern first and foremost. "Why's that?"

<Pose Tracker> Kamui has posed.

Telling Kamui to stop doing calling Acacia Master seems about as counter as telling a peanut-shelling robot to stop shelling peanuts; like it seems to be so ingrained into her mechanism that she can't stop doing it.

"Master ate the doughnut at record pace...! That was..." Kamui's eye camera squints for a moment.

"An S-Rank Clear of Doughnut Eat! Congratulation, it's a new record, mui..."

She jazzhands very gently as if to shower her with imaginary confetti.

A pause as she tilts her head and listens about the priest.

"... I don't know. The Sword-Magess... makes me very sad." A longer pause. "Very sad... but Kamui doesn't know why." She puffs up and says, "But! If it's tower shots the priest wants..."

<Pose Tracker> Acacia Saitani has posed.

The redhead puffs up in imaginary pride as she plays along. "Yeah, it'd better be," she huffs. "I can't just let you come along and take my title just like that, after all. Thanks," she adds abruptly, wearing that lopsided and slightly sheepish grin. Living with someone is still something she's getting used to, but she has to admit it has its perks from time to time. "I guess I seriously needed it."

In the end, Acacia expected the answer to be 'I don't know'. She doesn't know the first thing about Reploids or how she managed to wake Kamui up, but she knows enough to realize just how many holes have been punched in the other girl's memory. Still, the feeling alone is something to hold onto - another little clue from which they might be able to assemble a whole, or at least fill in the gaps bit by bit.

That thought makes her frown, and look up towards the bookcase. "You know... if you want, I've got a history of Meria Boule around here somewhere," she muses to herself as she tracks along the spines. "It might have the rest of the legend for you, if you wanted to read up on it a little more. Maybe it'll jog something."

She glances again at the downturned Reploid, though, and trails off before she clears her throat. "But, only if you want," she adds as she kneels down to sneak back under the kotatsu - this time, on Kamui's side, as she nudges the robot to the side a little. "Budge up a bit, make some space." It's on impulse, but it feels like the right thing to do to share a little space.

<Pose Tracker> Kamui has posed.

MEMORY ACCESSED

"Oh? Kamui, are you alone here today?" asks A., the mysterious woman with a blank face as she pulls in from the front door and looks around. She gently reaches out for her head to pat it, comfortably. "Is Dr. Lumen and M. not around..."

MEMORY CORRUPTED

"... ..."

Kamui seems silent there by the text, but she's actually emitting little sad blips. Blip blip blip blip.

"Master, you should make sure you're fed and have enough to drink," Kamui empathically insists as she holds up another doughnut. Eh?! She looks a bit surprised when Acacia offers her to tell her about history, though. "I'll work hard to learn more about Meria Boule...! Maybe there will be something..."

She scoots over, though, when Acacia asks her to make space.

<Pose Tracker> Acacia Saitani has posed.

She's not sure what impulse made her sit next to the robot girl - but part of that question is answered pretty quickly when she hears the succession of quiet beeps. Of course she can't say for certain what they mean, but they certainly register to her as a kind of sad noise, and she finds herself lifting her hand to place it amongst Kamui's hair, headpatting the girl next to her as she slides back under the kotatsu.

"... we'll save that one for dessert and split it," she suggests with a puff of air. Kamui's brand of kindness can be a little infectious or go a little too far, as can her sweet tooth, and it's not the first time she's had to delay a treat. "I'm gonna need something a little more solid, first."

She pauses, and rubs her hand against Kamui's hair. She could kind of get used to fussing over the other girl like this, she realizes. "Only if you want. I mean, it's up to you what you want to believe in, right?" she encourages, not knowing of the Reploid's own history. "And, well, that goes for any of the books up there."

<Pose Tracker> Kamui has posed.

"Hmm... what's a more solid food, Master? Kamui agrees! When she needs something more robust than croissants or doughnuts or cake... Kamui enjoys chewing on magnets!" And thus the magnet gag keeps perpetuating itself. ... does she really just eat and gnaw on random pieces of metal? Does that even help??

She bobs her head one way. "What I believe in, Master? Hmmm..."

She pumps her hands again, like she were doing her canned 'enthusiastic!' animation. "I believe in Master! And... in... doing a journalism too. I'll help Master make money for the refractor I ate!"

Not that that was literal, but... ... yeah, she probably would eat rocks if not stopped, wouldn't she...?

<Pose Tracker> Acacia Saitani has posed.

Acacia can't really tell if Kamui's joking or not, but she's learnt not to take the things that the Reploid says for granted. She's certainly not the sort to just deadpan something like that out of the blue, at least, and so the reporter makes a quiet note that taking her to Guild Galad might be a really bad idea or at least leave her with a very rotund and sleepy Kamui, what with all the scrap around.

Not that she was ever intending to go back there for long, but ever since living with the robot girl, 'replacement parts' haven't been far from Acacia's mind. Where else is she going to get them?

Hiding her quiet grimace-- turns out to be unnecessary, because Kamui is quick to try buoying her up again. Saying that Acacia's forgotten about the refractor would be using the wrong word; she certainly does remember its sparkle and lustre, even as it shattered and broke.

Still, the real truth is that the thought of ruin-robbing is not one that sits well with her in general, especially given what she found instead. Was it something important for Kamui's maintenance she broke? Did it have something to do with the Seraph they found?

Not that she's going to admit that outright just yet. Instead, with a puff of air, she reminds herself to leave those questions alone, and instead offers Kamui a light grin. "Well, I'm relying on you. We'll impress everyone together, right?" she encourages, then hums. "As for dinner... maybe I'll just osmose energy from heat," she decides, bundling the blanket around the two of them. "Moving feels hard."

<Pose Tracker> Kamui has posed.

Perhaps this will be a mechanic in a future chapter where Kamui will devour scrap metal and turn it into Force Metal... wait, no, she's not quite from that corner of the theme. She does puff up rather comfortably as Acacia sits next to her, though. Once more, the reaction is very comparable to that of a child being seated next to mom.

"What article should I write first, Master?" Kamui lights up for a moment, then has a grin as she says, "Kamui understands a lot about that."

She shows this by blobbing forward onto the table and speaking the legendary line:

"This is the human emotion of lazing around. It's comfortable, mui..."

<Pose Tracker> Acacia Saitani has posed.

"Hmm..." Acacia sounds out a slightly sleepy noise, quite content as she recharges under the blankets. "Well, maybe it's a good opportunity. How about you go ask about the church and the renovation tomorrow, get some photos from high up to show how the tower will look, then you can ask about the Sword Magess if you like?" she wonders. "It wouldn't hurt to properly report how the place is doing. As for me..."

She pauses, sitting back up as she thinks it over, still a bit professional even now. "... well, I can go with you if you think you might want the help, or just a check on how you're doing. Town Hall's supposed to be letting merchants know the new tax rates in the afternoon, but that's going to be kinda dull." More important, she thinks, but probably too dull to keep Kamui's attention.

She snorts, letting out a breath. "I dunno aobut the 'human' emotion. I think you've got it handled," she drawl, poking for a moment at the smaller girl's blobbed cheek despite herself.

<Pose Tracker> Kamui has posed.

"The Sword-Magess..." Kamui sounds just a little bit reticient, closing her eyes. A longer pause, before she nods as she gets pumped again, wagging her hands as she expresses, "Kamui will work hard! Exclusive footage of the beautiful Cathedral spires, only seen here in the Meria Bouletin!"

A pause, as she bobs her head.

"Hmm... Master should only cover exciting topics. If it's dull then... it's not worth covering!" Kamui also decides. T-that's not really a good thing for a newspaper, now is it?

It seems to certainly be too dull...

Then she gets her cheek poked. Poke! "Mui," comes the almost immediate reaction.

<Pose Tracker> Acacia Saitani has posed.

With a puff of air, Acacia lets out an amused sigh as she decides to plonk her head down in turn, glancing across at Kamui as she gives the girl another poke for good measure. "It's not like I enjoy it either. But sometimes, the important news is dull, or sad, or really annoying. You still have to report it, otherwise people won't know about it."

Nostalgia creeps in at the edge of her voice, and her gaze is a little far off as she remembers her old post in Guild Galad; mentors and teachers that got her this far. "That's the secret job of a reporter. It's not enough just to report what's exciting. You're doing everyone a service. ... well, you've got to know when to not go overboard, too, I suppose," she admits with a snicker as she comes back to herself. "But, I figure you'll get there."

A little too cheesy for her, perhaps, and she seems a little embarrassed as she turns her gaze forward again - then leans up to stretch out her arms. "Mmmh-- anyway, I'll be looking forward to seeing what you write," she adds more brightly, then glances up at the window at how dark it is outside. "... c'mon. Let's go get food before it's too cold out there, then we can dive back under here."

<Pose Tracker> Kamui has posed.

"Sad news..." Kamui murmurs very quietly. "Hmm... ...one day, maybe I'll learn how to deal with that."

Which she would, with Operation Mi'ihen.

That's in the unknowable future, though, so for now, she's just being very comfy as she looks out the window in turn and perks up as she reaches for a suspiciously familiar colourful beanie and several layers of puffer jackets, as she goes to cosplay Shalune and slot herself as Smol Shal.

(She's probably about the same size as Shalune but mannerisms probably tic her underneath whereas Shalune is considered the Default.)

"Readyyy!"