1572/Social Filters

Social Filters
Date of Scene:	23 May 2024
Location:	Mitakihara General Hospital
Synopsis:	Kyouka comes to check in on Mamoru, and gives a belief/pep talk, and gets Ideas. Mamoru's just like, oh man, Kyouka's ideas are terrifying.
Cast of Characters:	Mamoru Chiba, Kyouka Inai
Tinyplot:	Sunset of Sora

---

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
He's definitely doing way better than he was, with all the friends who have come in to heal him over the past few days, but Mamoru's right hand is still a huge bandage mitten, and his left shoulder is still copiously bandaged as well. No more burns on his face or forearm, though, just peeling over new pink skin that has the doctors and nurses stymied.

On the windowsill, the side opposite the open sliding glass where Anko comes in at night and makes herself at home on Mamoru's bed, there's a teddy bear in a tuxedo with a white felt mask; around the room are a bunch of fresh green healthy potted plants. Nephrite just left to get some coffee, and Mamoru has very recently had bandages changed, so is absolutely high on painkillers right now.

Kyouka Inai has posed:
    Nephrite leaves the room, and the vague sound of talking can be heard a moment later from the hallway. Nephrite's voice, and a woman's, recognizable as Kyouka despite being muffled by the shut door unless Mamoru is higher on those painkillers than expected.

    The voices fall silent, and a few moments pass which may make Mamoru begin to wonder if he heard right after all. But then the door slides open and in she walks, in her usual getup including sunglasses indoors. "Hey kid. You look like crap." Is her greeting, and though her tone is jovial and affectionately teasing, there's a hard anger lingering at the edges of her eyes behind those glasses as she beholds the boy for the first time in person since his injury.

    Finding a chair, she grabs it and spins it around to sit beside his bed, with the back towards him, straddling it with her arms crossed over the backrest. "How you holding up?"

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"I'm great, Kyou-chan," says the kid in the hospital bed, offering Kyouka a thumbs-up with his left hand, without actually lifting his arm. "They got a psych in to verify it and everything, apparently I was on unaliving-watch the first couple of days after I woke up but they approve of me having friends that keep me company."

His voice lowers. "Koji-kun said if my Shitennou got too clingy or angy he'd Sort Them Out and I didn't laugh at him."

Then Mamoru exhales and says less ridiculously, "I'm tired and depressed and Kazuo is very good at jogging me out of doom-spirals from unwelcome what-ifs. Also when I'm not just asleep, this stuff blasts my social filters right out of the water. Sky. Mountainside. Whatever."

A beat. "I'm getting used to not being here and that's not great actually. What do you know?"

Kyouka Inai has posed:
    Kyouka gives him a hard look at 'Kyou-chan', kinda like 'I have thoughts about you saying that but in deference to your condition I will save them for later'. She huffs a short breath at the rest of his words but likewise reserves comment- she is neither the type to mince words or offer comfort in the way that a lot of Mamoru's other friends are. Perhaps that is why she has waited to visit until now. She is, at least, self-aware about it.

    "I didn't think 'too clingy' was an option for you, at least with regards to them." She says, with mild humor. She does not say 'I'd like to see him try, anyway' although she's thinking it.

    "I know you were burned and your magic somehow disrupted or drained and I know Sunbreaker is the likely culprit. Neph just told me you confirmed that, at least. I spoke to Fuyuko about it earlier and she has no idea what's going on but is going to try and find out. Haven't heard anything from her since, though."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"Shit, tell her to be careful," says Mamoru, lifting his mitten-hand and using the back of it to mash his glasses up on his face. "And like. To not try and talk her out of it. Or let her see her. She just-- she held me still, burning, and just took everything. In a couple of seconds, maybe less. She had a lot more strength, judging by her fire going right through my cape like butter, than I did as Hematite."

He's silent for a half-second, blearily watching her through glasses that are at least clean, and then he says, "She's not even calling herself Sunbreaker anymore. She's calling herself Sunset of Sora. But she's also like... possessed, or something. The last thing I felt from her before she took everything was that she wanted someone to stop her. Tiny little unicorn-voice begging."

After a second, he looks back at the ceiling and smiles, and it's a weird smile. "I didn't beg. I didn't scream, either. I kind of forgot to, but I'm claiming badassness instead." Silence. "I'm going to hate fire forever. RIP Zoi and Mars."

Kyouka Inai has posed:
    Kyouka absorbs this information calmly, although the tightness of her lips becomes a little more pronounced. "I don't have to tell her, she knows to be careful. But I'll warn her, anyway." She's already taking out her phone, in fact, typing out a quick text message and sending it in a matter of moments before slipping it back into her pocket.

    The information about Sunbreaker changing her name and begging for someone to stop her is shrugged off with a mild shake of her head. She doesn't really care about that. Stopping her was going to happen whether she wanted it or not, and the fact that she may be possessed or under some kind of control matters not a whit to Stellar. It changes nothing about what needs to be done and therefore is irrelevant.

    Is it any wonder she was such a paragon of popularity in her youth?

    "You're tougher than you look, Mamoru." She says quietly after a moment. "And I'm not saying you look soft. Just don't sell yourself short. You survived, which means you have options. If you had died, you wouldn't have any. That's the important thing."

    She pauses again, then asks, "When you say she took everything...?" wanting clarification on this. It is probably important, and not just to Mamoru.

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"Thanks," says Mamoru first, to 'you're tougher than you look'-- he doesn't protest it, but he also unhooks his mind from his body so he doesn't have to fight off the 'options' he's afraid of while he's trying to have a conversation.

He sounds a little more distant, a little airier. "Rashmi said that any power I would normally be regenerating is flowing away from me. Any magic people try to lend me to kickstart my own is going away from me, too."

It starts a litany. "She took my capacity to hold magic. She took my connections; I can't find anyone or anything, not the ground, not north, not myself, not Usa or my Shitennou, not even you, sitting right there in front of me. She took the healing, the psychometry, the touch empathy, the roses, the henshin, the attack. She took my connection to this planet, Kyouka. She took everything."

He exhales, he closes his eyes. "Rashmi is already talking to Usagi about how to track Sunbreaker with the connection she stole."

Kyouka Inai has posed:
    Kyouka listens in silence, her arms folded on the back of her chair and her chin resting on her crossed forearms. Her expression is not sympathetic, though surely seeing her friend in such distress is not easy for her. There is a sense she is absorbing this information, turning it over. "Interesting." is her comment.

    A moment later, she sits up a bit straighter, chewing her lip. "Look, I'm no scholar. But I know a thing or two about magic. I've been dealing with it for over a decade. What I'm getting from this is that she hasn't actually taken your magic away, she's just cut off your access to it and is siphoning it to an alternate destination- herself, I'm assuming."

    She looks over the bed, out the window, as if tracing the line of that connection as Rashmi has already deduced is possible. "That means your capacity, your connections.. they're not gone. They're just unpowered. The same way you can unplug a TV, and the TV is still there, it just doesn't work. You just need to plug it in again. In this case I guess it's more like she's attached a siphon to your incoming power line and is stealing your juice. The TV is plugged in, but it isn't getting any power because it's getting re-directed before it gets to the plug."

    Her eyes return to him, ashen and steady. "The solution is simple, then. Remove the siphon and the power goes where it belongs again. You're not broken, Mamoru, you just need to be plugged back in. And to do that, we need to remove the hotplate someone plugged in to the socket that should be yours."

    She snorts in mild amusement. "And before you say it, yes I know 'easier said than done'. But I am always more amenable to a situation that can be solved with stabbing someone."

    A moment later, she says, "You don't need to worry about finding me, Mamoru. I'll be here, whether you can feel it or not."

    "Connections don't dissolve that easily. Through life, death, time and dimensions, they'll surprise you with their resilience."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"That's a positive way to look at it, I hope it's true," says Mamoru. "The... hotplate business. Electrical analogy metaphor thing."

His head turns to look back at Kyouka again, and his smile's less weird this time -- it's more reflex than active thing, autopilot, but for all that it's not fake. "I've noticed, don't think I haven't. And hey..." A beat. "While I'm helpless and pathetic and impossible to refuse, what's your real last name and how did you get away with getting hired under 'Inai'??"

Kyouka Inai has posed:
    "Always look at things in the most positive way you can, until proven otherwise." Kyouka says, with a half-smile. "You'll be surprised what a difference believing you can win makes, even when logic would tell you something different. Logic and I have never particularly gotten along."

    She looks at him for a moment at the question, before sighing and answering. "...Asakawa. But that's not who I am anymore, so don't go telling people it's my 'real' name. Kyouka Asakawa was a different person, from a different time. Inai is who I am. The Fade saw to that. As to how I got hired... look, the Headmistress hired me to train magical kids in how to slay monsters. She wasn't about to question my choice of name just because it was a little nonstandard."

    She quirks a brow at him. "The only other person who even remembers that these days is Fuyuko. I'd prefer it generally stayed that way."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"I won't tell anyone. It's not anybody's business, not even mine," Mamoru admits. "Thank you for humoring me." He's quiet for a second, and then his left hand taps the sheets next to him, as if patting someone's hand-- or maybe he's just moving it because he can.

"As far as belief goes-- I don't have to believe it'll work out when I can believe that Sailor Moon and everybody together can make it work. I just have to remind myself of that a lot."

After a moment's silence, he says, "I told her to get the whole school together. Sunbreaker can't stop everybody at once."

Kyouka Inai has posed:
    "It's the same thing, kid." Kyouka says, with another cockeyed smile. "Whether it's you, your friends, or well-meaning strangers- it'll work out. Believe it and it will be so. People like to go on about the power of friendship but as far as I'm concerned, it's the power of belief- not in some god or unknown supernatural force. Belief in yourself, in your friends, in the general capacity of people to stand up to evil."

    "The thing that monsters like Sunbreaker never seem to grasp is that no matter how much power you have, if you use it to abuse people they are going to stand up to you. There's no power in this world great enough to stop people coming together to smack down a big, arrogant asshole who thinks they can get away with anything just because they have that power."

    "I believe that. And I believe in Sailor Moon too. She'll get it done. The moment Sunbreaker chose to steal power and use it to hurt people, hurt you of all people, she was already doomed to fail."

    She leans back a little in her chair, glancing to the window again. "Doesn't mean we can't stack the deck a little, though."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
Mamoru's face turns toward the window too, and he's grateful it's open, and he has never wondered how magical cats can jump in windows that are multiple floors up, and he decides he's not about to start now. "I'll believe," he says, and he also says, "please don't get killed picking a fight with Sunbreaker. I'd be extremely put out."

Then he sighs and glances back to Kyouka. "I'm sorry, I'm really tired. I don't want to kick you out, I like your company a lot." He did say his social filters are off. "But..."

Kyouka Inai has posed:
    Kyouka shakes her head a little as she stands. "No, that's appreciated but you need your rest and besides, I've never been the 'sit around when there's beating to hand out' type. You know that." She doesn't say how he should know it, but assumes its self-evident.

    She turns to the door, pausing with one hand on the frame to look back at the boy in the bed. "Don't worry about me, Mamoru. As many frustrated people have told me over the years, I am very difficult to get rid of."

    She walks out, and as she's walking down the hallway Mamoru may think he hears her whistling a tune... 'and the cat came back..'