karma police, arrest this man, he talks in maths...

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Who: Matt and Ukoku Sanzo
When: January 5; just after morning sirens
Where: fire escape outside the windows of apartments 808 and 810
Summary: a morning smoke after a long night without leads to some random conversation between next door neighbours
Warnings: none, I imagine

Comments

[heretic_monk]

Transitioning from having so much to preoccupy him to doing little but plan his next few steps was tedious. Well, not precisely "doing little"; he had spent the first night resting from the skirmish he had been in, and the second one being severely annoyed when he saw the no smoking rule.

He would've gone outside, too, if he hadn't seen the shadowed figure of a rather large bird fly past his window. Its sharp teeth peeked out from its wicked smile. Ukoku chuckled, waved it goodbye, and snapped the curtains shut before returning to the device he had found with him - a slim laptop of portable size. There was that post somewhere, he had found, that could tell him whatever that was. Such a fascinating place to land in, too small for people to be able to avoid knowing each other, but large enough to be the stage for a brewing conflict.

Now if only he could find the person who reinforced this no smoking rule...

When sunrise arrived, Ukoku was still awake, sitting atop his bed and taking a break from all that reading. He cracked an eye open to check the time on his NV before stretching, working out the kinks on his shoulders before slipping off the bed and heading for the fire escape linked from his apartment. Sleep was a tempting option, but it didn't feel right to not have a smoke before going to bed.

Ukoku stepped outside, and chuckled when he spotted someone a window away. It seemed someone else needed the nicotine, too.

"It seems I have a neighbor," he said, fishing out his own pack to light his own stick.

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Matt was only aware of the world around him in the most vague sense of the world. It was counter-intuitive for him to be in that state, but he'd had too much sleep, there was a headache settling in at the base of his skull in the back because of it, and he was in a bit of a daze. No coffee, no nicotine, an empty stomach, going on three days without a shower when he usually did that every day...he was altogether more than a little messed up.

At least all the sleep had calmed down the soreness from the bullet wounds.

Still, he was slightly caught off-guard when an older man stepped out of the window to his right, and Matt almost fumbled his cigarette, dropping it from the fingers of his left hand and scrambling to catch it with his right. He made a face as the embers caught his fingertips, but righted it quickly enough to avoid a burn.

Glancing over to the side, he peered at the man with bleary dark blue eyes that barely showed under his mop of dark hair, sticking up in every direction, "I guess so." he mumbled, taking another drag of his cigarette to soothe his slightly fractured confidence after that fumble.

He exhaled slowly, smoke curling around his head, took another drag, and spoke on the exhale, tendrils of smoke twisting up from his lips, "I'm Matt. What's your name?"

[heretic_monk]

My, it seemed like someone was paying attention elsewhere. Ukoku rested his arms on the railing after taking a drag from his cigarette, and propped his chin up with the heel of his palm. The kid looked young, more or less the same age as the pet monkey Genjo Sanzo had taken in, and even in the weak light of the morning Ukoku could see he needed cleaning up. Not that he could complain, either; he probably could use a bath, himself, and the state of his robes couldn't help with the image. Still, one had to make do with an encounter such as this, unexpected meeting that it was.

"Better be careful with that," he said, tipping his head to look at the boy - Matt - better. "There's no telling when you could buy a fresh carton. And it's Ukoku."

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He was slightly dazed still, from too much sleep and recovering from what he remembered - getting over the trauma of vividly remembering your own death was a little bit distracting. It was too vivid. He could still taste the blood and gunpowder.

Shaking it off, he gave the older man a bit of a scowl for bringing attention to his fuck-up with the cigarette, and took a decent drag from it, doing his best to look dignified. Honestly, it didn't quite go over the way he wanted, but a bloke could pretend, couldn't he?

"Nice to meet you," he paused, thinking about the name. It sounded Asian, and Ukoku himself looked Asian, but he wasn't sure if he was Japanese or not. It took him a few long awkward moments to work out how to address him, and he opted to just stick with the English - he'd probably be expecting it from someone who looked like Matt anyway, "Ukoku."

At least he made a point of pronouncing it perfectly.

"Yeah, affording cigarettes and food...and new clothes. Might be a problem. At least we get to stay here for a month free."

[heretic_monk]

Unfortunately for most people, Ukoku had the habit of testing the waters when he could see a weak point. It was a little game he played when he met someone new, and most of the time he got rather good results. For his acquaintance's sake, however, he permitted a small nod in apology, with a little smile expressing the right amount of remorse that could pass as sincere, but not too sincere.

Best not burn bridges before they even got off the ground.

"A pleasure," he said. "I've been counting how many I have left. Old habit. It's a pain to have to go out in the middle of the night to get more." Not entirely false, considering the maze of hallways he had to go through to get out of Houtou Castle just to go outside for a walk, if he wanted a little exercise.

The filter remained pressed against his lips when Matt mentioned their living conditions, and he nodded in agreement.

"Job hunting will be difficult. I've heard that most establishments are controlled by one faction or the other."

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Matt shifted slightly, settling his ass on the fire escape and easing his legs into a crossed position, his body slouching forward and one elbow resting on a knee, back swayed comfortably. He let out a little snort of bitter laughter accompanied by a puff of smoke when Ukoku mentioned going out in the middle of the night to get more cigarettes, his fingers gracefully tapping the ashes off the end of his own fag, watching them tumble down through the metal grate of the fire escape.

"Maybe a pain in more ways than one." he said, his voice tinged with bitterness, "I tried to go out to smoke at some point, I'm sure, and there was...something...hovering outside the window. Every monster from under your bed..."

He shook his head, and sighed, rubbing at his eye with the heel of his right hand, the left fiddling nervously with his cigarette, half-smoked, "Factions? I think I missed that part."

[heretic_monk]

Monsters under the bed, indeed. Ukoku remembered the rustling of wings from outside his window, and the terrible gaze of that creature's eye before it flew off. Fascinating. It had been like looking at the bottom of the abyss of hell itself.

"Withdrawal will be another monster to contend with if you ran out of smokes an hour before sundown," Ukoku remarked: a matter in fact. Then he chuckled. "Imagine trying to outrun a million killer birds on the way to the convenience store, all for the want of nicotine, only to find out that they've locked the doors. It's like a bad horror film."

He nodded absently and took a puff before answering. The smoke was a toxic orange in the early sunlight, rising to the air in a hazy coil. Ukoku wondered if the kid saw the same shade that he did.

"Someone was asking about it the other day; the post should still be up. It's quite a pain."

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Matt lifted the cigarette, dark blue eyes blank as he stared at the bright embers on the end, how they ate up the tobacco and converted it to a cylinder of ash. Part of him could not be convinced that this wasn't some kind of dream, or some death-hallucination. After all, he'd done nothing other than sleep, and didn't even have a scar to show for the bullets he'd taken.

Tapping his finger against the side of the cigarette again, he let the ashes fall on his pants, right hand absently brushing them off as his left brought the cigarette back to his mouth, his eyes flicking over to look at Ukoku. Horror films. That he could identify with.

But this place made no logical sense, not in any way, shape, or form. There was no reason this could work. Of course he'd heard of supernatural things at home, when Mello gave him the rundown of what they were dealing with, but this was a few steps beyond 'supernatural things' and right into weird nightmare territory.

Except he'd failed to wake up thus far, and the last thing he remembered was dying.

"Yeah, I think I'll suffer the withdrawals." he mumbled, lifting his hand to push his hair out of his face, and accidentally smudging ash on his forehead, "This place makes no sense."

After a moment, he added, "I guess I'll check that post out later on then."

[heretic_monk]

A nonsensical world is the worst place for most to be in, and the best test to see how far the limit was before how they broke. That was the charm of this cast-off island, cut off from the rest of this world by the fickle will of a network of malfunctioning machinery that was rumored to reside in the deep, dark basement of one building. It was as if God resided in Hell and condemned everyone on this earth to nightly terror and eternal strife.

God as a broken central computer receiving and sending broken signals to the rest of the network. That was a rather apt metaphor for probability and the laws of chance - a spasm of electric current governed by the factors of physics.

However, all computers can be hacked, reprogrammed, and remodeled. It was merely a matter of finding the correct codes and hardware.

"The only difference between what has sense and what doesn't is the amount of logic that we have to apply to the situation."

Ukoku flicked the butt of his cigarette to tap off the collecting ash. Would the landlord be irritated to find a pile of cigarette butts on the fire escape when Ukoku left? How far would the man go to make him clean up the mess? There was only one way to find out, once this smoke was finished.

"You should. It's rather illuminating." He pauses here, looking up as if to study the ceiling. "Something called the Core supposedly mutates people if they don't have any special abilities like telekinesis to begin with."

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Matt rubbed at his eyes again, listening to what Ukoku was saying. It seemed he thought about something first, and Matt's interest was piqued, wondering what exactly was going on below the surface. He was used to being around people who laid out their logical thought processes in words so everyone could understand - it was how most of the people at Wammy's House had operated, at least the ones who were into the logical process and deduction.

When Ukoku finally spoke, Matt nodded, and sighed, rubbing at his eyes, "This situation requires a bit more logic than I'm used to having to apply. I'm not even sure which direction to start moving in. I've either been drugged, or this is some kind of hallucination, and apart from that, I'm not sure what it could be." he furrowed his brows, not wanting to suggest the afterlife because he just...didn't want to admit to having been shot before he arrived.

The concept of an alternate universe that he'd been dragged into, or the idea of having been ganked from Japan to somewhere in Canada bothered him. He couldn't apply any sort of logic to it, not in his own mind.

The last line of what Ukoku said, however, struck him sharply, and he glanced over at him, "What? Telekinesis?"

[heretic_monk]

"Both of that could have happened," Ukoku said, "or neither. We could be in an alternate dimension, in a dream, or the figments of someone's imagination." He shifted, and the sunlight gleamed on his eyeglasses, masking his eyes for a moment. This was reminiscent of what he had told Sanzo three days ago, in that twilight spent in the forest. Existence was a transient matter, and all the footprints one has left will be erased by the next tide.

"Does it matter, in the end, when we're already here?"

The theory that this was the afterlife was also one that had crossed Ukoku's mind more than once, when he remembered needing to dodge that bullet in the last second, the sharp scent of gunpowder and bloodshed nearing him at rapid speed. There was a fifty percent chance that it had hit. Was he brain dead now? The thought brought him unholy amusement.

"Yes, telekinesis." He returned Matt's look with a small smile of his own. "Funny, isn't it? There may be other kinds, too, based on what that person said."

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Matt made a non-committal noise, taking another drag from his cigarette, playing a game with himself to see how long he could let the cylinder of ash get, whether he could finish the cigarette before it fell without rushing. He frowned slightly at what Ukoku said, thinking it over, very obviously lost in thought while he went over the relatively limited number of variables he had to deal with in his mind. Drugged. Hallucination. Figment of someone's imagination. Alternate universe.

It wasn't an impressive set of options, not in the logic department. Some were from a crime drama, some from a fantasy film, and the last was purely science fiction. The government had been far too busy dealing with Kira to develop technology like this.

Pushing a hand back through his hair, he made a noise of frustration in his throat, shaking his head, "None of that makes sense, and of course it matters. Logically, the only way to find a way to get back where we belong is to work out how we got here and then reverse it, correct? Unless some other option presents itself in a more obvious manner, that's the most logical answer to this puzzle."

He shook his head a bit, "As for telekinesis, I've never seen a reliable report on it being real, and I certainly didn't have anything like that at home. I don't think the technology exists to alter someone that way."

[heretic_monk]

It seemed that the sleepy boy could still keep up with a complex conversation, yet. Ukoku chuckled around the filter between his lips when he watched Matt continue smoking without tapping the ash away. Such a brat, to need this kind of distraction while he thought.

"Why don't they make any sense to you, when mentioning two other possibilities already indicates you've at least initially thought that there was logic in them? If you think all of the above are incorrect, it follows that you have to assume we're conversing as people whose bodies and minds were pulled from one world to the next until an alternative plausible theory is presented. What you've proposed also follows this same conclusion. Therefore, the nature of our situation - if we are in reality, a dream, or otherwise - is irrelevant at the moment, for as long as we're operating within the context of the game."

He paused to stub his cigarette on the metal railing and let it fall to the floor of the fire escape. Trial one, begin.

"This puzzle box we've been handed has an interesting mechanism. It will be interesting to see how it works."

Matt's last line made him smile. If he only knew what Ukoku already has experimented on, on what else was possible in a world where science and magic both existed. The Port was one such world, too.

"I find that technology, like many other things, is only limited by the imagination. Many things only written about turn out to be real, as strange as they can sound."

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Having a game to play while he talked had always helped Matt concentrate - it was just the manner of things. Whether it was his console, or some kind of word game in his sentence usage, or something as simple as handling his cigarette as if it was made of spiderweb to make sure the ash didn't fall off. It just helped him focus.

He took another slow puff, his brows furrowing even more deeply as he thought. It was a valid point Ukoku had, but he had an answer for it, "When one is thrown into something that makes no sense, one usually tries to make sense of it. At least where I come from..." he trailed off as the ash fell off his cigarette into a grey smudge on his jeans, and he wiped at it absently with his fingertips - game over.

"I guess it would make sense to look at it that way, but I'm not satisfied with just accepting what people tell me, especially in a place like this. I'd rather know for certain, and at the moment, an alternate dimension sounds like something out of a science fiction picture. Maybe possible, but where I'm from, not plausible. As far as I know, they're not even really trying to do anything along that sort of line."

He sighed, and lifted his right hand to rub at his eyelids, trying to settle the headache that was settling in behind them, "A game, hmmm?" he mumbled, after a moment, interest piqued, "I like games."

Giving his head a small shake, he sighed and looked over at the older man, "I certainly don't feel different than I did at home." he said, shaking his head, "You'd think I'd feel different if they implanted some kind of strange ability into me."

[heretic_monk]

"It's not so much as acceptance, but the removal of bias. This is just the tip of the iceberg."

Ukoku took out a wrinkled carton of cigarettes and a box of matches from his sleeve. The former looked like it had been dragged through rough concrete; Ukoku had dodged Gojyo's shakujou by jumping, but the crescent blade had snagged the end of his sleeve. A quiet tap and a strike of a match later, Ukoku made a soft sigh as the fresh dose of nicotine spread through his nerves.

He estimated that he'd be able to complete his investigation of surface matters within two weeks' time. Only then would he be able to decide on his next move, and the ones after that.

When Matt said he liked games, Ukoku turned to rest the small of his back on the metal rail, and placed his elbow on the back of the arm that he had positioned over his stomach. There was one way of livening up this conversation.

"In that case, shall we play one to pass the time for the morning? The two of us will list down what abilities could possibly count as strange. The one with more answers wins."

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Matt's eyes flicked to Ukoku's hand when he brought out the pack of cigarettes - beat up, almost as much as his own, which was crumpled in the corners but thankfully hadn't been hit by any bullets. Either that or the damage done to them had been corrected along with the damage done to his body, his goggles, his clothing.

Instead of taking out another of his own cigarettes, Matt simply stubbed out the one he was smoking to the best of his ability on the grated bottom of the fire escape, then dropped the still-half-lit butt to the ground, watching the embers fall down several stories before petering out. He was thinking about Ukoku's mention of removing bias, and he tilted his head to the side. He didn't comment on it, but the point was taken and accepted in his own mind.

When Ukoku proposed a game, Matt jerked his head to the side to look at him, eyes narrowing slightly under his messy mop of dark hair. He had a sudden feeling of foreboding - perhaps he shouldn't have said that he enjoyed games. He was familiar with dealing with manipulative people, and there was something about Ukoku that was almost familiar...

Brushing the thought off, Matt tilted his head back to look at the sky through the grating of the fire escape above, thoughtful. What harm was there in this game, what information would he give away? Perhaps what kind of abilities were available where Matt came from, or the abilities he could conceive of. It didn't strike him as particularly useful information, so long as he left out any information pertaining to the Kira case. He could even pull all the abilities from the science fiction shows he knew, just to make sure there were no personal insights in there.

After a moment to think this out, he nodded, "Sure. Why not?" He lifted a hand to his mouth to cover a yawn, "You start."