2020-06-18: The Truth Is Extremely Ugly

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  • Log: The Truth Is Extremely Ugly
  • Cast: Lunata Croze, Citan Uzuki
  • Where: Claiborne
  • Date: June 18, 2020
  • Summary: Lunata and Citan have a private conversation about several things, including Rephaim, the nature of her curse, divine punishment, and terrible rock puns.

<Pose Tracker> Lunata Croze has posed.

    The chat with the Black Wolves and Josie, as well as Shalune, has left Lunata with a lot to think about. The reason behind the Rephaim not responding to her... how she should feel about betraying Seymour -- and what lingering feelings there are. It's a very chaotic time for her.

    Right now, though, even she recognises she needs a break; she's staring up at the Gear as she puts a towel over herself, taking what looks like a pack of juice to her lips. It's a far cry from the kind of food she'd make herself.

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    "...So this is 'the Rephaim'," says a familiar voice from behind Lunata.

    In apparent silence, the country doctor has approached where she now stands. His gaze remains on the Gear itself. He stands with his arms folded across his chest, his expression pensive.

    "It is an uncommon thing to come across a Gear from even five hundred years ago, you understand. I have only laid eyes on Gears alleged to date back a thousand years or so a handful of times. One as old as this..."

    He lapses into silence, then shakes his head.

    Citan frowns slightly. "...But, hmm, what is this? Something about it does not seem quite right..."

<Pose Tracker> Lunata Croze has posed.

    Lunata turns -- she kind of has to turn more than usual given only one of her eyes is functioning, the other wrapped under bandages in that Rei Aya***i style. Rather than blood, though, the bandages almost look like they're wrapped in... grease. Or something else viscous and black.

    "... hey, doc."

    She gets up and scratchs her head. "Yeah, tell me about it... I mean, it's been a few years now, but I think this is a Zeboim-era Gear... that's what Lily thinks, and others too, anyway."

    A pause, as she tilts her head. "Something's... not right?"

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    Is how she looks now what he was expecting, when she turns to face him? He must surely know some of her predicament, though perhaps now is the first time he has yet seen her in such a state. If there were any doubt remaining about her and her condition--

    It's still hard to read what he's feeling. The only real word for the look on his face is 'complicated'.

    "Perhaps so," he agrees. "At times, it seems that the Zeboim era must have been one of great marvels. Even now, we struggle to recreate the least of their wonders." Again, he shakes his head. "And yet, that civilization collapsed, vanished, indeed, nearly without a trace. Perhaps there is a lesson there for us, even now. Or, especially now?"

    The world is, after all, nearing--

    "...Now that is a good question, Miss Croze. I cannot rightly put my finger upon it, but something about it seems..."

    He shakes his head. "Forgive me. I may be rambling on about nothing again." His gaze shifts to her. "And you? You are..."

    Perhaps asking after Lunata's 'health' may not be the most prudent of options, here. And she is not precisely 'well'. There is a long pause, perhaps as he attempts to choose his phrasing wisely.

    "...being attended to?"

<Pose Tracker> Lunata Croze has posed.

    Lunata turns -- she kind of has to turn more than usual given only one of her eyes is functioning, the other wrapped under bandages in that Rei Aya***i style. Rather than blood, though, the bandages almost look like they're wrapped in... grease. Or something else viscous and black.

    "... hey, doc."

    She gets up and scratchs her head. "Yeah, tell me about it... I mean, it's been a few years now, but I think this is a Zeboim-era Gear... that's what Lily thinks, and others too, anyway."

    A pause, as she tilts her head. "Something's... not right?"

<Pose Tracker> Lunata Croze has posed.

    "There was a city... underneath that Singing Ruin, Rujm el-Hiri, where we found the Gear," Lunata shares with Citan. "It was very strange, like... tall rectangle buildings made out of stone, with roads also made out of stone. Mom said it was a Zeboim city, but... it was full of deathly butterflies."

    Lunata slumps her head. "I think... eventually, I'm gonna have to come back there and figure it out."

    Why the Zeboim collapsed... at the very least, Lunata is getting closer on one reason why. The state she's in now, the divine punishment exacted upon her...

    Are you... being attended to? Citan asks.

    "Yeah... Lily shot me with some Death magic, and my body's holding on together."

    ... how does a simple country doctor react to this?

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    "Hmm..." the doctor muses, as if trying to place the name. "Was it Fei who spoke of that ruin to me? The name does seem familiar." Though he clearly hasn't been -- right? "So underneath that ruin is an ancient city... I see."

    He's taking this in stride. Though after what they have encountered so far--

    ancient ruins. ancient ruins everywhere

    --perhaps that might not be surprising.

    "It is over in Ignas, is it not? Perhaps if the Yggdrasil were able and willing..." Citan shakes his head. "Otherwise, I am afraid our Gears cannot 'reach' the continent." There's not a fuel tank big enough to run even the most-stripped down energy-efficient Gear that far.
    And a ship would take far too long, considering what is unfolding here and now.

    'Lily shot me with some Death magic', Lunata explains.

    There's really no other way to put it. Doctor Uzuki is taken aback by this one. He fidgets with his glasses a moment. "I... I see..."

    There's really no part of that sentence she'd said that is well or good, but neither well nor good are the state of things right now.

    "And, in the long-term, you will...?"

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    It had been a normal day. A normal night, in fact.

    Up until the moment that Lahan had been flung into the path of war. Just by chance, it seemed.

    Or perhaps, it had been fated from the beginning.

    "It was all at about that time, yes... It feels as if it happened such a long time ago," Citan remarks, shaking his head. "And yet, it was only three years. How the time flies. I wonder how..." He trails off, his expression a touch distant for the moment.

    But he says nothing more.

    At least, not on that topic.

    "To be forced into a situation over which you have no control... it is a difficult situation, certainly, for him and for you," he remarks, on the subject of the whims of fate. Those who do not want to fight are forced to fight. Those who wish a peaceful life find only war. This is the world in which they have all been born.

    Nevertheless, in spite of the odds...

    'The Gear's not responding to me right now', Lunata explains. Citan's expression gains a more thoughtful cast. "I see... I wonder if..."

    If that's what he had picked up on, somehow? He doesn't, of course, elucidate.

    "If it is your will, what about it has changed?" he asks her.

<Pose Tracker> Lunata Croze has posed.

    Lunata is silent for a while longer.

    She has an inkling of what it might want from her. But in a way, it's also horrible to say. Instead, she listens a bit further to what Citan has to say. Three years... how time flies. He wonders...?

    A pause.

    To be forced into a situation over which they have no control, grappled onto the cruel and whimsical, capricious nature of fate...

    "Doc... you remember how the last time we talked, the last time we had that sparring match... I was pretty at my wits' end, right?"

    Lunata puts her hand to her elbow. Then, she seemingly speaks a non-sequitur as she says, "The Rephaim's... not a gift. It's a curse. A punishment."

    She tilts her head. "It's meant to be a trap to lure people who seek power into a contract with it... that's what I understood. That was what happened, when I fell into the cockpit and begged for my mother's life."

    The young girl, the ex-waitress, looks back to the doctor. "Since then, every time I've wished for power, it grants it -- in exchange for my time. The length of string that measures my life. But..."

    She frowns. "It only responds... to a desire to live, I think. A desire to cheat death. So it can devour more of it. But ever since I fell into that spiral of death in Spira, and after..."

    There is a longer pause. She feels like she's so close, but the truth is extremely ugly.

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    Sometimes it is the nature of things to be flung into the middle of a situation, barely knowing what has come before, only just grappling with what is happening now, and without knowing how it might end.

    It is natural to seek a sense of control, when caught up in the whims of fate.
    It is rare to actually find it.

    Citan has found in the course of his life to date that the only real solution to be had, such that it is, is to surrender all illusions of control.

    In the end, everyone answers to something or someone.

    Perhaps it's only fitting that such ruminations come now, when he speaks with Lunata again. After all...

    "I remember," he says simply, for once to the point.

    It's not a gift. It's a punishment.

    He wonders, fleetingly, about Weltall.

    "I see... A means to punish one with the very thing they desire? That is..." He appears to consider the matter for the moment.

    "...Particularly mythic. There are many myths in which sin is punished in some fashion," he reflects, unfolding his arms as he explains, to gesture. "I recall several stories in which the punishment is simply 'destruction', of a person, a lineage, or an entire nation. However, there are a few stories in which the punishment appears to be more... particular to the person in question." He pauses as if to collect his thoughts. "I recall one story of a man who locked away death so that he would escape dying, but only for a time. Eventually, death escaped and claimed him, and then in the afterlife, he was immediately tasked to push a boulder up a hill. Except, when he would reach near to the top, the boulder would always slip away and he would be forced again to start from the beginning."

    But that was the punishment for a man who had attempted to elude his own consequences. Is it such a sinful thing to wish to save a parent's life? Perhaps there are some who would say that any movement against the order of things is inherently wrong, but...

    He cocks his head as if she had said something particularly interesting. "'The thread of your life', you say? Then what will happen once none of it is left?"

    Perhaps she doesn't know. Or...

    Citan folds his arms over his chest again and bows his head.

    "And... you do not wish to go on?"

<Pose Tracker> Lunata Croze has posed.

    "... I'll be eaten," Lunata doesn't blunt or shy away from the answer to that question.

    She opens her eye and looks to Citan, once he has asked the question of what it means to have no thread of life left remaining. "Everyone else that has come before me ran out of time, and their... souls... memories? Are all stuck inside the Rephaim... or rather, this..."

    The katana that she carries around comes to view in her hand, seemingly summoned effortlessly by magic. "This... key to it all."

    Lunata takes a moment to digest Citan's view of it being mythic. It does make sense... in Guardian scripture, there are many stories like that too.

    "In relation to that story... maybe the rock presents itself to tempt others cocky enough to push it up to the top of the hill?" Lunata makes a guess. She ain't no Prometheus expert. Ask Shalune or Yue on that.

    But Citan has a more salient, immediate question.

    "... ... I have to go on," Lunata answers. "At least right now. I have to go up to the top of that mountain and stop... Seymour."

    She lowers her head. "The man I betrayed..."

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    "...I see." Neither does he express any sense of shock, or anger, or sympathy. Or anything, save the comprehension that what awaits her at the end is precisely what awaits so many others who have come before her.

    "Those who sought eternity are granted it. It is... a fate worthy of myth, indeed," he remarks, and perhaps the shake of his head here may have to stand in for whatever sentiments of his own he might have on the subject.

    But at his age he knows full well that one can't outrun their fate. Even Fei may well...

    His gaze falls to the blade that appears in Lunata's hand, and for a moment, he really does wonder. If things had gone at all differently...

    'Maybe the rock presents itself to tempt others cocky enough to push it up to the top of the hill?' Lunata wonders. Citan fails to keep the corner of his mouth from twitching in what might be a ghost of amusement. "Ah, no, I do not think so," he responds, nonetheless. "The story is I believe a metaphor for embracing inevitability, rather than..."

    Rather than the intricacies of her own situation.

    Though, when you compare the two stories--

    What does happen when the man finally stops pushing and lets the boulder sit?

    "Then you intend to carry on?"

    ...Lunata is not at that state just yet.

    "The man that you betrayed..."

    Who is the traitor? The one who spoke of one thing while veiling the depths to which the rest extended? Or the one who said 'no more' and stood their ground?
    Who is the one betrayed? The one who had another they trusted turn against them? Or the one who had their thoughts and feelings twisted about in their time of need?

    "Loyalty and trust... are difficult things," Citan remarks, lifting his head to gaze up again at Rephaim. "When we stand behind one person, we may betray another, even unknowingly. And perhaps, that person may betray us. At times it seems... we can put our faith in no one else at all -- that otherwise we are doomed to be hurt or to hurt others. Perhaps, the thinking might go, we then can only truly trust in ourselves."

    He pauses a moment, unfolding his arms, then shakes his head.

    "But to think like that is... incorrect. Even if we are wounded, and even if we wound others... to trust and be trusted, with the understanding we might fall is one of the means by which we gain 'a soul'. ...At least, that is what I think."

<Pose Tracker> Lunata Croze has posed.

    Lunata's received plenty of counseling, of course. That Seymour betrayed and manipulated her first; that she doesn't need to feel bad about striking back. But in the end, feelings are complicated, and as Lily said, it's not wrong to feel complicated. As Shalune said, it's okay to not be okay for now...

    She listens to Citan's ruminations of loyalty and betrayal.

    "I think... as people, we get hurt and betrayed a lot, even by people who don't even know or mean to," Lunata speaks. "I know that one from experience... back when I told you about someone who shone too radiantly for me..."

    It doesn't have to, after all, be a conscious betrayal for the heart to feel betrayed.

    "To trust and be trusted... that's the measure of a 'soul'..."

    Lunata tilts her head, chuckling gently.

    "... I wanna think that too... during my worst days, that's some of the things I hang onto. On the days where I don't think I have a beating body, or blood flowing through me, or the little things that make me think I'm human..."

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    If there's nothing else that Citan Uzuki knows, it's that fact.

    Feelings are complicated. Relationships are complicated. Obligations and responsibility are complicated. Complication is an unfortunate component of life itself, it seems.

    Things have only been less than 'complicated' perhaps three times total in his life. And even then, eventually...

    'This too shall pass' is not a promise. It's a statement of fact.

    He's still looking at the Gear and the Gear alone.

    "Indeed... Simply by living our lives, we hurt others and are hurt ourselves. But to experience anything less is to shut ourselves away." He pauses for a long moment, as if dwelling on something.

    "I am... reminded," he says at last. "Yui... my wife told me a story once, not long after we first met. There is a story that when God created humans, a woman came to Him and asked, 'Will we die, or will we live forever?' The story goes, God had not considered eternal life but was not unwilling to grant His creations this. The woman then picked up a rock and walked to a stream and declared, 'If this rock floats, we will live forever. But if it sinks, we will die and so have compassion for others.' She threw the rock, and of course it sank. Thus it was so."

    He pauses, glancing back at Lunata. "...To hurt, to suffer... to struggle and fail... these things that cause us pain grant us empathy for others. That is the meaning of that story."

    And perhaps in doing so, gain a 'soul'.

<Pose Tracker> Lunata Croze has posed.

    Lunata gazes towards Citan for a long moment, and-- and-- bless her soul, yes, her soul! Her first reaction, after nearly two minutes of not talking at all, is--

    "...... why is it always rocks, in mythology??"

    A pause, as she coughs embarrassedly, scratching her head. "But... no, I get it. I mean..."

    She glances aside. "You know... I'm going to look and probably feel sixteen forever. Lunie's like, twenty now, and she's growing taller than me... and Jay was already older. Growing, with all the pains and joys... I get why eternal life isn't something that people attach empathy to."

    She lowers her head. "... sometimes, my body doesn't feel pain too. It just eats damage and keeps going. So it's... valuable... that my heart can feel pain. Because if I can't even have that much..."

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    And his reaction, his honest reaction is:

    He laughs. It would take a much harder man than -- yes! -- he is to not laugh at a comment like that. She says that she gets what he means, to which Citan just shakes his head, regarding her now rather than the Gear.

    "No, you are correct. I suppose anything less than a rock would not grant the story the appropriate 'weight'?"

    ...That's just abominable. Trust him to have a real strain of 'dad humor'.

    But he's somewhat more sober when he addresses her statement. "Yes... many think that it would be desirable to possess eternity, but fail to comprehend what it means to live forever."

    Lunata might be in a position to appreciate that best of all. Even he -- at times -- wishes he could turn back time, wishes he could have 'more' than what will likely be alloted him. But in the end there are things that must be so, and will be so.

    "..."

    Lunata's heart...

    "In feeling, we are alive, or so it has been said," he glancing up at the Gear again.

    The machine, which remains silent and still.

<Pose Tracker> Lunata Croze has posed.

    Lunata -- pauses and laughs, perhaps just as incorrigible when it comes to terrible dad humor, scratching her head. "That was quite the rocky one, doc."

    Yep, totally. I mean, she was never a highbrow girl...

    "Maybe the correct path to take would be to slumber forever, without feeling, such that the machine never awakens. And in doing so, never avail it to anyone else..."

    Lunata pauses.

    "But... now is not that time for me."

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    Citan simply shakes his head and chuckles. "I have been told that my sense of humor is, ah, not particularly gneiss."

    (oh no don't encourage him!)

    But such mirth doesn't last long.

    "The correct answer... I wonder," he says, glancing back at her.

    What is the correct answer? The one that reduces the most harm to the most people? Or...

    "In the end, that is something we must all answer for ourselves."

    That may be the most he can give her. The correct path -- or her path. Whatever it is, it is her own decision to make.

<Pose Tracker> Lunata Croze has posed.

    Another pause. "Even I... can't paper over that one," Lunata answers, not knowing what a 'gneiss' is. They're making puns on different intellectual levels...!!!!!