1051/Just, Kyubey

Just, Kyubey
Date of Scene:	26 January 2024
Location:	Beach
Synopsis:	Amy, Sayaka and Klarissa meet up to have a big discussion about themselves. Happens after Texts: Prelude to a Stormy Talk.
Cast of Characters:	Sayaka Miki, Amanda Faust

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Sayaka Miki has posed:
Amy had texted Sayaka because she wanted to talk with them about Kyubey. Her fingers tensed when she read that name, just that enough to bring back her feelings of anger at the white critter, and she is the calmer one. Though, it's with Klarissa that Amy has business, so Sayaka reluctantly makes her way to break the news to her twin.

A tense discussion later, the bluenettes and Ula are at Yumegahama Beach, waiting for the redhead to turn up. Sayaka is eyeing the frown Klarissa has on her face, still feeling a bit tired over the challenge getting her here has been and worried about the fact the worst has yet to come. Her twin is keeping to herself, standing a bit further away and really giving the impression of a wounded animal ready to lash out.

Amanda Faust has posed:
    Some hours after the Witch encounter, Amy is able to focus again and realize why she's been unstable these past few days. Great. But that night, she sends Sayaka long-overdue texts.

    The time and place is worked out to be the next morning, Friday, at 11 at the beach. Okay brain, can you please keep it together and be normal tomorrow?

    The next day Amy feels... well. Not great, obviously, but stable. Hey, she's getting the hang of this life! Just like her classmates! When she looks at it that way, she's almost in high spirits!

    High enough to weather that wait, the beach?! That's like ages away by train and she'll have to schedule and catch it at the right time and uuuuugh. At least she can read on the train.

    Yeah it's January there is nobody here, so even though she's short it's easy to see Amy coming. She's clad in an oversized green jacket with the hood up, a plaid felt scarf wrapped around her neck over the coat, dark slacks, and her usual sneakers, with her hands in her pockets for warmth. Her long red hair spills out the sides of her hood, blowing in the wind. She waves and nods, then quickly puts her hand back in her pocket. Cold.

    Amy finally comes into hearing range. "Hey." She looks uncomfortable, but that's probably the cold.

    "Good morning. Um." She rocks her head to one side, thinking. How to word this. "Look, I uh... I wanted to actually talk with you. About why you're so down on yourself because of what Kyubey did to us. Because... I'm not being much of a friend, if I... if I don't even talk to you about a problem like this and just... get all annoyed at you, right? So... ugh, I'm bad at words. I'm sorry. But please. I want to help, but I don't know how, when I don't know why you're so down on yourself. I uh, hope that since we came all this way, that you'll talk to me?" She offers an unsure smile.

Sayaka Miki has posed:
When she sees Amy arrive, Sayaka offers a wave, with her hand, and a nervous smile, and so does Ula, who had somewhat mentally prepared for this encounter after meeting the witch with two names.

For her part Klarissa does wave at her too, even if it is accompanied by an unpleasant expression. She isn't ready at all to have yet another person try to get her to look at the positive side of life or some other sunny details she really doesn't feel in the mood to entertain. Still, she thinks she will avoid chewing Amy out over it. Maybe.

"I see you want to help, Amy-san", she chooses to open with, "but I am not sure what you would like me to say." She fidgets with the Soul Gem ring as she says this. "We are just rocks puppeteering corpses around, and if you feel differently about, that's awesome for you, but I am not ready to just ignore that. Sorry about that."

Amanda Faust has posed:
    What she'd like Klarissa to say? "The truth." Amy answers. And, to her credit, Klarissa tells her! Well. Not quite the whole truth, she thinks.

    Amy shrugs. "It's true that I'm not exactly... that I have reasons to not be so bummed out about it. But also. I don't understand why you're so bummed out about it."

    She looks at Klarissa, eyes narrowing slightly. "Like. Anything can be made to sound awful. Before?" She pulls a hand out of her pocket to gesture but aborts that, COLD, and stuffs it back in her pocket.

    "Before? We were just patterns on the surface of wrinkly jell-o, driving those same corpses around." She turns and paces back and forth. "There was nothing magic about it. You can slice a human, slice a brain, down however thin you like, and you won't find a single particle of mystery, an atom of soul, a molecule of conscience or love or hopes or dreams." She shakes her head. "Nothing there but particles following physical laws. Electrochemical interactions. Programmed by past experience, on hardware shaped by millions of years of evolution."

    "Evolution which is no god, not some being of values or morals or directions. Not even the blind watchmaker Azathoth. It's just physics at scale. DNA that survives long enough to get passed down to the next generation does. We're just machines to pass on our genes, crawling on a great big rock that flies in a curve around a big glowy machine for turning hydrogen into helium."

    She turns towards Klarissa and leans over. Which is uh. Not intimidating when she's shorter. "So what changed? Why didn't you feel that way before? What's gone?"

Sayaka Miki has posed:
Klarissa doesn't really have the patience to dissect all of those technical details Amy tells her. And regardless, she feels like it's rather missing the point, when as they were before, there wasn't an easily removable part of themselves that could turn that body on and off.

"Our bodies weren't dead at all earlier. We weren't a completely separate magic rock that made sure to keep it animated. We were one and the same with that body, now we aren't." She shakes her head, thinking that her purpose is only one and by being out here, she is betraying that purpose.

"And I don't care if science can't find the soul, Kyubey can, and has even stuffed it into a pretty little jewel without warning us. We aren't in our bodies anymore, and we will never go back to them. I just don't want to subject other people to a lie. How can I smile at them with this body, embrace them with this body, have fun with them with this body, when that's not even me?" Klarissa grits her teeth, really feeling the impulse to just shout at somebody or something.

Amanda Faust has posed:
    Amy stands up straight again and cocks her head to the side. "Whaddayou mean. You take out the brain or even a piece of the brain? Corpse. The pattern on the wrinkly surface of the jello breaks? Vegetable on life-support. Heck, a lot of parts of the body are like that. Bodies are famously easy to kill and difficult to save. That's why you have to go to school for like a decade to be a doctor, but to be a murderer you can just pick up a knife or a gun. Or poison. Whatever. A rock if you throw it really hard or it's pretty heavy."

    Amy shrugs. "Our technology can't move the pattern to different wrinkly jell-o or to silicon yet, but I hardly think that means it's impossible."

    Amy sighs. "Boy. 'How can I smile with this body. How can I embrace them or have fun, when that's not even me'? You're makin' me a little mad now. You look in the mirror and see that body you want to be in, and see it in pictures, and everyone else sees it too. And yet you--"

    Amy freezes and drops to her knees. "Damn."

    "...You do sound a bit like... you're getting in your own way. Like I was, at first." She stands up. And pulls her hands out of her pockets to clasp to her chest. "Here it is. My ideal body. Well, I mighta liked to keep my old hair and eye color, but these look pretty good too." She smiles at those last few words, and then throws her arms out as she steps one way, then turns and steps the other. "But I was so 'worried'. I'm a fake, you see. A thirty-six-year-old man. You met me! What I thought was the real me."

    She puts her hands back in her pockets and turns to face Klarissa. "And here I felt awful for lying to everyone. Intruding in your space. An imposter. When... when I absolutely hated the idea of going back, but I thought I had to if I ever got the chance. And I... and I absolutely..." She blushes and looks away. "I love every little thing about people treating me how I look now. A-apparently there are an awful lot of people who feel this way. O-or the reverse."

    Amy scratches her head. "Okay. I already knew that. But now I know we're not just weirdos. Thanks to Hannah, and Coco, and Usagi, trying to get me to see."

    Elbows out to her side, she taps her chest with splayed hands. "This is me. It was me before I looked like this. It's me regardless of whether I'm patterns in a brain, magic in a rock, or typing on a keyboard and all someone sees of me is words on a screen."

    She sighs. "Pheww. And yet I still feel constantly like I'm a little bit fake. Every little thing is a reminder of how I came here by magic most people won't understand and not... naturally. So, some of what I just said was bluster. I'm trying to make myself believe it."

    She slumps, and looks at Klarissa, slipping her hands back in her pockets. "What I'm trying to say is: Who you are's got nothing to do with the shape of your body, or your meat robot, or your rock, or whatever. The body that contains your consciousness can lie. Or it can line up. Or be a little off. So who are you?! Who's the real you, speaking to me from inside that rock??"

    Okay she's kind of rambling all over the place, but she's trying! She's got spirit! Or something!

Sayaka Miki has posed:
"You said it yourself" Klarissa growls at Amy. "Easy to kill, not killed. That body would be still alive regardless if how easy it is to make it not so. Please, stop wasting your time with things that have nothing to do with this matter."

She scoffs especially hard when Amy says she doesn't think moving that pattern thing is impossible. "And what of it? If they become able to move souls around like Kyubey, good for them." She doesn't care about the insinuation that Kyubey isn't moving souls around. She has seen Lulu collapse dead. She has heard the white rat confess. And he certainly knows more, since he is the one doing this.

"I am sorry you died when you finally got to be yourself", Klarissa says with acid, speaking of how she saw all of them. The fact Amy can talk with so much confidence and happiness is getting on her nerves, and she wants to be left alone. But of course magic has reserved her a bad in this too, and she is stuck with her happy go lucky twin.

"I can see why you would rather believe that everything is fine, but it doesn't change that your body is dead. Feel free to live your life and be happy as much as you like."

She kneels, taking her ring off her finger to copy the runes on it onto the sand. "That is probably me. I mean, it has the same letters as the name of my original, the heroine of justice that wants to do the right thing. And that's all that's left of me now. So I will continue saving people, again and again, only making sure I am well enough to continue to do the right thing."

Amanda Faust has posed:
    She's just not getting through... although, she wasn't insinuating that Kyubey was lying about moving the soul.

    She winces slightly and rocks back as if hit, when told she's died. Huh. She'd read people sometimes acted like trans people killed their old selves, but she never expected it to be applied to her, here. Well, half-applied, anyway.

    Why she would rather believe everything is fine? Amy sighs. "This was always the plan. I hoped to live long enough to see my pattern moved. I think that's the other part of why I can accept this." One last speech is forming in her head, but--

    Klarissa is writing runes in the sand. What? "Letters? The heck are you talking about? Those aren't any letters I know... what language is that?"

    Wait, she's looking at her ring...

    Amy switches her soul gem from pendant to ring form and looks at it. Her SOUL is bright red, as it's been since she cleansed it yesterday. Klarissa turned the ring over... Amanda flips her hand over.

    Sure enough, there are runes on the palm side of the ring. Huh. She never noticed that before.

    And one of them is the same as one of the symbols Klarissa has copied in the sand. It appears every other character in the pattern Klarissa copied (if those three dots are a character on their own) and as the first, last, and one of the middle ones on her own ring. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

    Eyes wide, Amy pulls out her phone and snaps a photo of Klarissa's sand art, then of her own ring. It's faster than copying them onto paper, which she can do later if she needs to. "Okay. That's weird."

    "I don't know what it means, but it's weird."

    Amanda shakes her head. They can investigate that later. Right now, the speech. It was important, damn it!

    She exits the camera and pockets her phone. And hands.

Amanda Faust has posed:
    "There's no one at school like me. No other magical girl I know in a similar situation. And no one... how can anyone really understand? So I keep reading stories. The same stories I've been reading for years. Written by people who are like I was. Well, and some people who probably weren't. And I wonder sometimes, why I do that. I see some terrible things. Peoples' imaginations are truly demented. And I, I wondered why I do that."

    She stares through Klarissa.

    "Why I stare into that darkness of humanity, again and again. I worried I was obsessed, or addicted. But I figured it out, just now. While I was trying to figure out what to say to you next. I expose my brain to that again and again, because I'm desperate for connection. Here and there in all the filth, I see thoughts and feelings like my own staring back at me from the page. And even if it's surrounded by things twisted and wrong..." She looks up at the sky. "Or, sometimes, righter than should have been possible to guess, or both at the same time, heh..."

    Amy looks back down through Klarissa. "At least I get to see it somewhere."

    She sighs, and slumps a bit, and looks away. "And ever since I learned the, this, truth about myself, I guess... I've realized that seeing those thoughts, on page or pixel, means there are a lot of people like me out there... And I can't do anything for them. What am I gonna do? Suggest they sign up to fight Witches? If Kyubey would even take them." She looks back to Klarissa. "You certainly understand how fucked up that would be."

    Amanda takes a breath. "Anyway. I bring this up because I've also seen what happens when someone has a twisted-up view of themselves for a long time. What it does to their thoughts. Year after year after year. I see work by the same people get weirder and weirder and more and more twisted up. 'Oh no. That name again. What will they do this time?' It can't be healthy for them. It's got to hurt them. The results would be funny if they weren't indicative of something so awfully tragic. But I can't save them. What am I gonna do, tweet them the truth when they'll never have what I have? When I can't make sure they'll be okay?"

    She points at Klarissa. "But you're here. Right in front of me. I can't... let you become like that. Either hating yourself or learning to laugh and revel at being just a rock, or a freak, or whatever."

    Amy slumps and sighs. "But, it's not quite the same kinda twisted up. You got everything you need, but you can't see it for reasons I don't understand. God damnit..."

    She runs up to Klarissa and tries to hug her. "Whether you're a rock or a girl, you deserve love! You're worthy of saving! Of caring about! Can't you see that?!"

Sayaka Miki has posed:
Klarissa has enough of Amy talking about patterns and whatnot, really. She was already fed up about people trying to convince her, about them trying to shove happiness down her throat and now she has to deal with this science-flavoured thing. Why can't people just learn to leave her alone? It's not like she is chasing them expecting them to either adopt her way of thinking, or just accept that's how she sees things.

And yet, they just can't stop trying to convince her they are in the right, and she is wrong about it, because of course, right? It could be nothing else than her having mistaken opinions about things she doesn't know. This is her soul, her life, and if it got ruined already, let her continue it the best way she can, even if she doesn't even have a right to her own name anymore.

No, even Sayaka the original was already abandoning her own life in favour of becoming a weapon in the name of justice, so it doesn't really matters what the others chose to call her. Klarissa suits her as well as any other name. If anything, the fact she is writing it on sand is an acceptable medium. Soon enough, it will be erased, just like Kyubey erased every joyful prospect she had with his lies.

"This is probably the name of my original", she shrugs to Amy. "Ula even crafted a copy of Sayaka's ring to gift Hinoiri for us, and we reached that conclusion then. It's her ring after all, and both that writing and the name "Sayaka" have six letters. And Amy takes a photo of it and her own red ring, like it was so important that she needed to study it. Is she for real?", Klarissa thinks.

"I think I would kill anyone that gives people over to Kyubey", she replies to Amy with no hesitation whatsoever, in a twisted agreement. She certainly believes that anyone that chooses to lead people to Kyubey with all the information is worthy of death, and is no different from the Witches themselves. Everyone who infringes on others' happiness, they deserve to be put down without mercy.

And Amy talks about having seen the darkness of humanity, of having sought it just so she could find pearls of light within. That... sounds so delightfully optimistic. But isn't she doing the same thing? Accepting Hinoiri... Accepting Sunbreaker... all just because she loves her. No, that sounds just about right.

But since they know the darkness, shouldn't they be all the more equipped to dispose it. This should be enough payments for her own wrongdoings. She would ask Amy to get involved, but with Sayaka here she knows that wouldn't fly, even if the redhead were somehow disposed to accepting. "Thank you Amy-san, I think I know what to do."

Sayaka, who stood by the sidelines, by that moment, intervenes, not liking the sudden change in tone "What do you mean, you know what to do? What are you thinking?"

Instead of the reply she wanted, however, she is met with a "Nothing that concerns you, and I won't back down on this one thing."

Sayaka starts getting into Klarissa's space, walking to her quite strongly. "Oh, yeah, because I will surely back down after I hear you spouting worrying stuff like that!"

'And there we go again', thinks Klarissa, an angry sigh being released inwardly. "Yeah, of course, I spend all time caving in to basically everything you say, only asking in exchange we dedicate a good amount of our time to patrolling, but one thing out of line and you are immediately on my case!"

Amanda Faust has posed:
    Sayaka has six letters. And the shared character appears where the 'a' would, because it also appears where the a's in 'Amanda' would. Why is there a weird English cipher on their rings? What does it mean??? But Amy will have to worry about that later because

    Oh no what did she just confess to a freaking teenager, what was she thinking?!

    Klarissa and Sayaka might not have understood what she was talking about but she's not sure how she worded it herself...

    Spinning out nervously in her own mind, her reaction to Klarissa's declaration is delayed a few seconds. The two bluenettes are already arguing when she says, "Wait, what???"

    She goes for another hug. "Klarissa, it's not about getting on your case. It's just worrying when someone who's depressed makes dramatic statements like that!" Especially when Amy just said she was worried Klarissa would become more warped over the years. There are, technically, two broad approaches to preventing that...

    And then loosens her grip, if she was even allowed to hug again. "Please don't do anything sudden. You're loved. And no matter how twisted up you get... I think you can still be helped, even if we don't know how." She looks away, then back at Klarissa. "Have you talked to Inai-sensei?"

Sayaka Miki has posed:
Klarissa dodges Amy's hug when it is coming. She is just really not in the mood for them. She is not even in the mood to be here and she is really tempted to transform, knock her own twin out and jump out of there after grabbing both her and Ula.

"And what do you want me to do, huh? Somehow snap my fingers and be back to being ok?", Klarissa bites back at Amy. "I just want you all to let me do my thing defeating youmas. What else can I even do? I explained why to so many people, yes even to Inai-sensei, but the only result is that she keeps listening, and I don't even know what she is learning!"

"Well, maybe I am just trying out suggestions of how to help you", Sayaka glares at her. "Haven't you thought of that?"

"No, you are just trying things that fit how you would like to see me!" Klarissa looks away from all of them, exhasperated to the brim.

Amanda Faust has posed:
    Amy winces. "I'm sorry. Of course I don't expect you to snap your fingers and be OK. I sure couldn't. It's probably gonna be a long and difficult, messed-up road."

    "...We're fighting youmas to help people. And you're a people too. But I don't know how to help you right now. ...Thank you for talking to me. And letting me try to help, at least, instead of just... assuming I couldn't." Does she mean Amy assuming she couldn't, or Klarissa assuming she couldn't?

    Amy takes a few steps back. "You need some space right now. Good luck, Klarissa." She nods to Sayaka. "Sayaka." And then she turns around and walks to somewhere she can sit out of the wind.

    Aww fudge, when was the next train back? Well, not like she's ever without something to do as long as her phone has charge.

    She pulls her phone from her pocket and returns to her browser. This one's pretty messed up too. But some parts of it...

Sayaka Miki has posed:
Amy has decided that she should leave, and in Klarissa's thoughts she can only wince as she commiserates over the fact she chased the redhead off, somehow her "Good luck" just twisting that knife in, but she caused this herself, what a fool...

"We... might see each other at school", she murmurs, not even sure if the redhead has heard that. Well, if Amy decides to avoid her, that's just better for her, and maybe Klarissa herself should be more proactive in that direction.

A glance to Sayaka's and Ula's horrified faces quickly makes her pace ahead, and soon she can hear Sayaka's steps follow her own once they get back on the wooden path. Ula probably is there too.