02 - Pull Yourself Together

[birdinthehand]

A - Venture Park, closed to Eiji Hino

This city was one strange, dangerous place. If it wasn't one thing keeping him from finding that blasted hobo, it was another. (Mostly, he was choosing to blame that weird purple Greeed for making messes and getting in his way.) But today he was determined to find Eiji Hino. He had reached the limits of how far he could grow while nesting at Joji Yuki's lab, or while huddled shamefully at the bottom of Hina Izumi's purse.

Mind you, Ankh has absolutely no patience left. There is no room for subtlety and stealth in his plans today. "EIJI! HEY! EIJI!!!" So there is now a very noisy floating hand rushing through Venture Park at inappropriate speeds. One that cares not for who he bothers or how much attention he's drawing.

B - Venture City in general

When you're more than just a floating hand, there are more things that you can do. Like actually go into an ice cream shop, purchase multiple ice cream bars (with money that was gotten via earlier pickpocketing, but let's not go there), and sit down to eat them all. Even if they don't taste like anything. Even if they don't feel like anything. They're supposed to taste sweet and feel cold, and maybe if he eats enough of them, he'll get something out of it.

But so far, it's just serving to tick him off, for obvious reasons and for reasons that feel just a few inches outside of his grasp. He looks very, very grumpy, for a man with that much ice cream stacked in front of him.

Comments

[hinavelous]

Oh. Well that... certainly was a thing Ankh's arm was doing, now wasn't it. She stilled for a moment in alarm, turning wide eyes on Ankh's arm and then back to his face, before hunching her shoulders and shifting her grip on Ankh's. Well, if he was going to make an openly protective gesture against this guy, she certainly wasn't going to aim to be immediately friendly. Then again, Ankh did have a habit of being needlessly antagonistic and unfriendly. Joji's words, though...

"Explode?" she echoed, glancing between them in concern. "Experiment-- Ankh, what is he talking about...?" Cue the gentle worry and a nagging inclination to tug Ankh closer to herself despite the fact that they were sort of already a somewhat smooshed pile on a bench. No, exploding would not do, he'd died once already wasn't that enough?

[birdinthehand]

He'd have to sit a lot farther away than that for Ankh to not perceive him as a possible danger. He shifts so that he's facing Joji, which loosens the hold that his arm has on Hina. It's still there, though. It still seems like a good idea. He doesn't like how this might possibly go. "If it does, I wouldn't be surprised." That gets a snort and a brief glance down to the two remaining ice cream bars and the small pile of popsicle sticks scattered on the tabletop. "It's barely better than having no body at all."

Oh. And Hina has questions. He side-eyes her, huffs sharply, and then puts his eyes right back on Joji. "This is Joji Yuki. He's a scientist. He put me back together." You'd think he'd be a little more thankful and cheerful about this, but... no. That's not how Ankh rolls.

[forgottendecade]

He wasn't going to go sit in the next country, Ankh. He couldn't look at the body and pull out his stylist to make notes on a floating bit of holo-screen that popped up before him. Anyone who was a scientist might understand some of the graphs and squiggles and other various things popping up on the screen, but on the whole, it was a higher form of science for most.

"You are the one who decided to walk off in it before I had even cleaned the seals completely off." He flicked his stylist at Ankh, but otherwise was paying attention to his graphs. "In fact, I believed it was still in the enclosure, drying."

Closing the screen and putting away his stylist, he nodded in greeting. "That I did. I had found the Core inside of a thief robot and restored it to life."

[hinavelous]

When Ankh shifts, Hina does too, trying both to not be in his way and to take a better look at Joji. Her arms slide off of his shoulders and she folds her hands in her lap, staring at Ankh for a long hard moment while he talks. Sir, she is going to have to give you a talking to when there isn't a spooky scientist watching. No exploding, stop talking like that, she is going to hit you, and you remember what Hina hitting you is like.

"Joji Yuki," she repeats finally, looking over at him. Then the words sunk in; he put me back together. This man, whoever he was, was the reason Ankh currently had a body. She pulled away from Ankh's arm, standing, and gave Ankh a very brief frowning expression before bowing nearly in half, facing Joji.

"Thank you," she says. Because she knew Ankh would never thank him, and it was impossible to tell if Ankh's reasons for not liking him were in any way legitimate. She stood again, straighter. "I don't know who you are, but for giving Ankh a body... Thank you."

[birdinthehand]

Ankh gave that holo-screen a distrustful glance, but wasn't in any position to understand any of it. "It looked fine to me. So I took it. I saw your notes." Well, what little had been left lying around, or left displayed on unsecured screens. And most of what he had determined was that the blank-body-thing was meant for him. But that was good enough.

And now Hina is being all thankful. Which is stupid. He sniffs lightly, pulls his arm back to himself, and puts his attention back on finishing his current ice cream bar. Even if he couldn't taste it properly, it was still his. He was going to eat it.

[forgottendecade]

"Prototypes rarely are fine." Although he usually was very careful in making sure that they worked as best as he could make them in so short of a time. Experience taught him that if the Great Leader picks up a weapon and it exploded on him, even if someone told him it wasn't ready, that someone will still be the blame.

And he really did not need to lose another arm.

"I am just a passing through scientist; nothing at all special," he said, getting up to return her bow. Joji was starting to understand why Tsukasa kept on calling himself a 'passing through Rider'. People were rather embarrassing with their thank yous. "I only did what I thought would be interesting, although there is one other matter I must address - like the fifty dollars missing from my wallet."

[hinavelous]

The words prototypes rarely are fine stuck with her and she frowned, obviously concerned. She turned slightly, looking over her shoulder at Ankh and his ice cream, and wondered for a long moment just how long he would be there before something took him from them again. She wondered if he'd have a chance to see Eiji again before that happened. She made a note to tell him to go find Eiji if he hadn't already, and sometime soon. Maybe they could all go out somewhere, and then she could conveniently go home to study.

She turned back to Joji as he started speaking again, smiling at his humble attitude. Just a passing-through scientist, she repeated mentally. Only did what he thought would be interesting. That part was a little less admirable, but--

Hina made a face at Joji's final statement, whirling on Ankh with a mortified expression.

"Ankh!" Seriously, bird. Why must you thieve.

[birdinthehand]

Ankh's eyes widen at Hina's scolding. She's mad? Well... well, fine then, let her be mad! He inclines his head towards Joji, and gives a tug at his shirt with his free hand. "Already spent it." Do you know how hard it was to find an asymmetrical shirt with one red sleeve for cheap? They should be congratulating him, seriously.

[forgottendecade]

"You should ask first." He raised his robotic hand up, shaking his head a little. "I know, all powerful being formed from pure desires, but still, even a note saying 'You didn't need it' would suffice. I do not think that my neighbors like it when I accuse them of waltzing into my house while I am in the shower."

He does leave his doors open for a reason, one of which was sitting there chewing on melting ice cream and making faces at him. He doubt his doors would last if the Greeed decided to blow it down. He tugged a purplish piece of candy out of his pocket and set it down on the table.

"You may want to take that, unless you want to be in possession of a human-sized puddle of something like pancake batter."

this is also a gloriously appropriate icon.

[hinavelous]

Of course she's mad!! You're stealing people's money to buy clothing and ice cream. She could have probably gotten you these things without you stealing. She huffs, moving over to him and snatching one of his ice cream sticks out of his hand.

"Ankh! You can't just go stealing people's money, that's--" She looked at Joji's candy and frowned, looking between the two of them. "...and eat that!" She did not want Ankh to be a puddle of pancake batter. He would make sour pancakes anyway.

[birdinthehand]

Ankh recoils the slightest bit when he raises that robo-hand. He's had bad experiences with it. He does not want to be on the business end of anything that hand does. So this makes him a little more apt to listen to instructions. Maybe he'll leave a note next time... but he gives no real verbal confirmation of this other than a huff that's less exasperatedly dismissive than usual.

"...what is it?" He does pick the candy up and hold it between his thumb and forefinger, and he gives it a sour stare. He will not be putting this into his mouth until he gets something resembling an answer. Even if Hina is insisting that he do so immediately.

[forgottendecade]

"Stabilizer. It should help with some of the dulled senses as well as making sure the goo that body was formed from stays in a solid form. Yes, I know that your kind doesn't actually sense things the way we do, but that should give you a taste."

Building a body without the use of a body was hard. It needed a skeleton, the complex nerves and blood vessels, the muscles and fibers, the organs, and of course the skin. Joji did have some prior knowledge with building bodies from scratch thanks to Shocker's 'let's create a monster from everything' agenda. But still, a regular human was a mass of bio-chemical reactions encased in a semi-tough outer shell of renewable cells. Humans were hard and he wanted to make sure that the body he made did not fall apart and scare other humans and make people want to find him and sue him.

[hinavelous]

Somehow Hina was unfased by the robo-arm. Maybe because Ankh here had spent so much time with a monster bird arm attached to him, and she'd met him primarily via just that arm. Weird arms didn't really bother her that much anymore.

She huffs. Don't question the candy from your body's maker if he tells you to eat it, sir. She then frowns some when Joji mentioned the senses, looking back at Ankh and his ice cream. Was he still eating them, even if he couldn't taste them...? She gestures to the candy and smiles at him, then.

"See? Then you can taste things, like when you had my brother's body." The lightheartedness with which that statement was given was probably a little bizarre.

[birdinthehand]

Being told that it would keep him from melting into a puddle was somewhat motivational... but being told that this thing could improve his senses sold him on it. His eyes dart between the two, and then he stuffs the purple thing into his mouth and tries not to look too eager about the whole thing. And since this is a matter of taste, what would this thing taste like? Like purple? (Purple is totally a flavor. There are many things that taste purple.)

[forgottendecade]

It starts out a muted icy purple, that kind that suggests the ghost of purples in the past that had somehow stayed around long enough to hint at what was to come. Then there was a ziggy purple, the kind that was a bit too ripe, but still melt in the mouth purply, which faded into the kind of purple that everyone sometimes feels the urge to taste; the purple that hit the back of the throat and coated a line all the way down to the stomach. It doesn't last, but the taste still lingered like an afterthought of purples waiting to bubble up again.

[hinavelous]

Hina perched on the edge of the bench Ankh was seated on, and thus commenced a period of watching a bird eat candy and gauging his reaction. Mostly, she wanted to see the look on his face if this candy did, as Joji suggested, return him a sense of taste.

A moment later she was standing again and trying to figure out where he'd gotten all his ice cream from. What he had was melted, and surely he'd want more of it if he could taste it.

[birdinthehand]

That was a whole lot of purple happening. And the fact that it was happening at all was absolutely amazing. He could feel it, could taste it... and everything else suddenly felt sharper. Not as much as his senses would have been if he'd been attached to a living human, but far better than a mere Greeed's capacity to perceive the world. His eyes went wide, he inhaled deeply, turned his eyes skywards, then swallowed what was left of the rapidly dissolving candy.

The next moment, he looks down to the table and grabs for the last ice cream bar that had been set out there, but it's all melted in its plastic packaging. Well. That won't do. Without another word to either of them, Ankh is rising from the bench and setting off towards the little corner grocery across the street. That's where he'd bought the others, and that's where he's going to get himself more.

[forgottendecade]

It looked like it did work, though Joji still wasn't that satisfied with it. Maybe if he had a lot more time, he would have been able to build more and get it closer to what he should have. But still, it was probably an improvement, especially since Ankh stood up and headed back to the store.

"I think a couple more treatments and he will have his full senses back," he muttered to no one in particular. Out came the stylist and his holoscreen, notes sketch across the flickering diagrams. "That is if he wants more."

[hinavelous]

There was a lot to say about watching someone like Ankh enjoy something. Hina never really figured she'd be standing near him, watching him appreciate the flavor of something, and catching herself smiling fondly at him for it. And yet, here she was.

When he got up she started, glancing between Ankh as he stalked off and Joji. She smiled at Joji's muttering, bowing forward again toward him.

"I think he'd like that, even if he won't ever say as much," she offered, glancing back toward Ankh as he retreated. "I'm-- gonna go make sure he actually pays for his ice cream," she added, and then scurried off after the bird homunculus.