(Untitled)

[i_spoiled_it]

Stephanie is in the bar. Well, more or less. She's in the rafters again, although she's not walking on her hands this time; she's lying on a beam being Very Still and Watching People.

She's holding, not wearing, her mask, and she doesn't look like she's entirely comfortable without it on yet.

[Akito and Steph talk about heroes, wars, and giant

Comments

[shipscook]

Part of fighting in space is learning to think in three dimensions. Otherwise you can watch the entire area around you and still be surprised from above or below.

Akito's still getting used to fighting in space. So he walks right under Stephanie two or three times without realizing she's up there.

[shipscook]

He leans back slightly and carefully rests his hands on the beam he's sitting on. "Not really. My hometown wasn't very green and not very big on animals or plants. Nothing grew very well."

He afterthoughts, "I mean, I like plants in general, vegetables and all, but I'm not much of a gardener."

He glances sideways. "I never really thought of a hero as someone who makes their way around at night all sneaky-like. What... what was it like?"

[i_spoiled_it]

Steph grins. "It was so cool. I think that's what I'm gonna miss most, the city. Gotham's all sort of close and built-together and dark, so we could just run and jump and flip and stuff from rooftop to rooftop, and when it was too far we'd hit the jump-lines." She pulls out her grapple and shows him. "There's totally nothing like it. Sixty stories up with just a line in one hand and a rooftop to aim at, it's pretty incredible. And, y'know, when you pull a bunch of guys off some poor girl out clubbing and they all look at you like you're the scariest thing they've ever seen ... that's pretty cool, too. Being able to take care of people." Her smile fades, and she doesn't seem to realise she's taken out her mask and is playing with it again. "Yeah, it was cool."

[shipscook]

Akito seems to think this is all terribly cool, his eyes lighting up a little at the sight of the hook. "Whoa..."

"Yeah, taking care of people, being a protector, fighting, the cool toys..." He grins. "You must've been some hero."

(Brief delays, RL, etc.)

[i_spoiled_it]

"You should have seen Batman," Steph says. "I was just an amateur, really." She notices the mask in her hands. "But we totally got the cool toys. I haven't figured out who Batman is yet, but he must be really rich. Look at this."

She shows him the rows of concealed buttons on the mask. "Starlight lenses, lights, radio contact, heads-up displays for all sorts of things. I could get weather reports in my mask and everything. All the time and radio stuff doesn't work here, though. Yeah, we got the coolest toys. But I still think it's cooler you being a pilot."

[shipscook]

Akito grins and looks down at the nanomark on his hand. So many people seem awfully impressed by his piloting and all. He's a little baffled by it.

"I suppose! I mean, I always thought the Aestevalis units were pretty cool. But we're still in the future from where you guys are, right? So for the time, this is -really- cool stuff." He leans in to check out the mask. "It's like neater than some of the stuff the military gets in my time."

[i_spoiled_it]

"Yeah, it's way ahead of anything anyone else in our time uses. If anyone's got anything like it, Batman gave it to them." Steph sounds proud. "What's an Asta - Aestev - a thingy unit?"

[shipscook]

Akito nods a little, thinking about that. Superheroes, he decides, are worth looking into. They sound almost as cool as Gekiganger.

"An Aestevalis? It's what I pilot." he explains. "It's a giant robot, with a modular design to make swapping parts in and out easy."

[i_spoiled_it]

"You pilot a giant robot? Honest-to-God, a giant robot? Oh my God, that is the coolest thing I've ever heard of." Steph flips herself up and does a cartwheel along the beam. "Can you bring it here? That'd be so cool! Wow, I so want to be you right now."

[shipscook]

Akito jerks as she swings up into a cartwheel and laughs, "Well, I'd have to be able to get home, but yeah, I guess I could bring it here. Not into the bar, though." He squirms on the beam for a moment. "Would have to explain where I was taking it, and figure out a way to..."

He looks kind of astounded, actually. "I mean, I think giant robots are cool too, but it's still a war machine. They lose a lot of sparkle when you have to fight other robots in them."

In spite of that he can't stop grinning.

[i_spoiled_it]

"Your civilisation," Steph announces, standing on her hands, "is the best in the whole world. In any of the worlds. Giant robots!" She sits down crosslegged on the beam. "I know war's never a good thing. But in my time, it's fought by people, and it's ..." She thinks of her time in Leslie's clinic, where people were being brought in horribly mutilated and tortured every few minutes. "... it's not a good thing. At least if it's robots and pilots, it's not civilians who are suffering. Not that I mean you should be suffering, or anything! But it sounds like a much better way to work things out."

[shipscook]

Akito can't help it. He cracks up.

"I'm really glad my world is officially the Best World Ever." he nods, beaming as he brushes a hand through his hair. His face sobers up a little. "Well. And it's not all... like that, either. The Nadesico is pretty much made up entirely of a civilian crew. Nergal Heavy Industries..." he turns to show off the patch on his arm, "...decided that the military wasn't doing enough to defend the people left on Mars after the Jovians attacked there, and they built a civilian crewed battleship to go there and help."

[i_spoiled_it]

"That sounds like something Wayne Industries would do. Only not on Mars, because in my time people don't live there. I think." You can never be sure. "But if you join a battleship knowing you're going to be a soldier ... or a cook ..." she grins, "...doesn't that kind of make you not a civilian any more? I mean, I wouldn't consider myself a civilian, but I'm. Well. Our kind of vigilante justice is ... a little bit illegal. As far as most of the world knows I'm - I was - just your average sixteen-year-old high-school dropout. Same with T - with the rest of us. We're only not civilians because we decided we weren't going to be, really."

[shipscook]

Akito nods. "We're... kind of criminal too. The UEAF, our military, tried to stop up so they could take the battleship and reassign it where they thought we ought to be. Called us traitors to the Earth..." He sighs. "That's... when we were escaping Earth, that's when my friend was killed." He glosses past that pretty quickly.

"I guess you do have a point, but I still don't feel like any part of an elite fighting force. You pretty clearly got training and stuff, I had to learn as I went."

[i_spoiled_it]

"Ohhh. Sounds kind of horrible. The military, I mean. Our cops, they ... well, I'm pretty sure they know we exist, but we help them, and they pretend we don't exist to the media, and that way we can stay secret and stuff. When Batman first started out the cops wanted to arrest him, but they got smart pretty quick. Because he's better than them, at everything." Clear case of hero worship happening here.

"So did I, really. I kinda started out by trying to stop my Dad. He was a criminal and I wanted him to go to prison, so ..." Steph's expansive gesture doesn't convey the confidence she'd have liked it to. "And then I just wanted to keep going. It's addictive, being a hero. Plus T- um, the Robin before me, we kinda dated, and he taught me some stuff. And then he quit being Robin, and then I got trained properly. But I still can't pilot robots." She's still in awe.

[shipscook]

He's starting to get that idea, but being the kind of guy he is, Akito is starting to hero-worship right along with her. "This Batman sounds really incredible!" he points out, "And you got to work with him? That... I can see why you're so thrilled about it." He's wondering, in the back of his mind, if he can find something about this guy somewhere.

Then he points out, almost absently, "You could pilot robots if you wanted to. Where I'm from anyway, you'd just need the nanite injection to control them." he glances down at his hand. "I mean, if you could get there somehow."