video / text; @sugarcane

[seafloor]

[ The video opens with a view of some undecorated Everlight dorm room. Panning around reveals little of interest: a made bed, a few cans of vending machine non-alcoholic sake—

And suddenly, the sound of a waterfall surging fills the feed with peaking audio. Bright blue blurs the edges of the feed until the space suddenly becomes a dingy city alleyway. A scarred hand lifts as if being inspected before it rapidly takes on a liquid appearance and the noise returns and the scene shifts again.

Now it's at Tokyo Bay. There's a brief pan of the seascape before the feed cuts. ]

---

Oh, shit. My bad.
I didn't realize that got uploaded.
This tech is still weird as hell to me.
I miss flip phones.

Comments

text @kijyo

[saudadist]

I didn't think anyone missed flip phones...

[seafloor]

It sucks that they can't match the capabilities of smartphones—at least, back when I'm from.
We traded style for convenience.
Also, hi.

[saudadist]

Hi I...guess
never really dealt with smart phones myself so I have no frame of reference there

[seafloor]

Then you lucked out.
I mean, they're very useful, but...
They all look the same. No individuality.
But maybe I'm just being a salty old millennial.

[saudadist]

not like it matters now

much easier to just talk like this
fewer misunderstandings

[seafloor]

Perhaps.
I suppose it's just the nostalgia talking.

Is there anything you miss from back home?

[saudadist]

nope

[ She answers too readily, as if anticipating the question. There are people she misses, but they're only a handful of bright spots in an otherwise dank and dark cave. ]

[seafloor]

[ He's not surprised, given their last talk at Tokyo Bay. ]

Fair.

...Was the whale sashimi any good?
I don't eat seafood, but I was curious.

[saudadist]

I thought it was delicious
though after all the trouble the damned things caused, I'd have been mad if they weren't

[seafloor]

Glad to hear it.

I still feel a little bad that they all had to die.
But that's my problem to hammer out.

[saudadist]

survival means doing things you don't want to do sometimes
but as long as the deaths weren't in vain, it's just another part of the cycle isn't it?

[seafloor]

I don't disagree.
I still have no intentions of taking another person's life, but I understand the necessity.
Every kill has to count.

[saudadist]

just out of curiosity

what defines "a person" to you?

[seafloor]

Tough to say.
Defining it too loosely or strictly has gotten me into lots of trouble before.

As a baseline, a person is someone with sentience and sapience.
So that includes a lot of what folks would call 'demi-hunans' or 'monsters'.

[saudadist]

makes sense

the meaning can be vast even when describing humans themselves

[seafloor]

...Yeah, that's true too.
Not all humans deserve to be called people.

Either way, I try to avoid ending a life unless it's to hunt for food.
Or, in the kaijus' case, there's absolutely no way to avoid harm otherwise.

[saudadist]

if they'd have made it to land, they would've killed untold civilians

good enough?

[seafloor]

That's what I meant with what I said earlier.
Letting them go would have been catastrophic.

Okay, topic shift.
Have you been to the greenhouse often?

[saudadist]

sometimes
it's a nice place to just sit and relax

[seafloor]

It is.
It's probably my favorite place to be while on base.

Got any spots that you like outside headquarters?

[saudadist]

a few
mostly parks and other quiet places

[seafloor]

Quiet is good.
I've found a few abandoned buildings outside of the city that I like.

There's the bay, too.
Sometimes I wonder if I could swim out far enough to find a kaiju.

@NIGHTFALL, text.

[yuwon]

I didn't think anyone still used them.

[ is this an age-related issue, or ... yeah, an age-related issue. ]

[seafloor]

Tch.
I resisted to the last...
But eventually I had to switch over so I could use LINE...

[yuwon]

Apparently, they still use that here so you're in luck.

Not the type that's into tech?