[Carmim Clover]

❝ AURA: 100% WORDS: 1783 | TWC: 1783 HAVE YOU SEEN HER? HAVE YOU HEARD? THE WAY SHE MOVES, THERE ARE NO WORDS How long ago had it been, she wondered, idly, as she wandered through the Red Class dormitories. Well, wandered was a strong word- it was more like she was just walking a few rooms down the hall, actually, but at the pace she was taking to get there, it may have indeed seemed like she was on some kind of journey. Her feet had been dragging a lot lately, actually; she'd been thinking a lot more than usual. Or well. Thinking about heavier things than usual- she was generally always thinking, it's just that most of it tended to be either silly, or much more superficial and internal than considering anything on a larger scope than herself and those immediately around her. She was thinking about Holly a lot. Ever since her old friend had been burned up by that faunus girl, she had been stuck in Carmim's mind. Not that she hadn't already been stuck there, honestly- as most of their classmates would have probably noticed, with any real attention paid to the two of them, they hadn't really been as close as they were before Rochdale. And coming up on the first anniversary of that horrible day. Carmim's mind was foggy with all sorts of uncomfortable thoughts about things so far outside of the realm of her much simpler thought processes, that she was a little overwhelmed by them. Things like ethics, and morality, and death. Good and evil, right and wrong, blurred lines. She was in over her head. So much so that she had forgotten about Jackie's offer to help her with her Scroll. Which, at the time, she had considered to be a really nice offer that might give Holly a break from her monthly Scroll repairs. And in all truth, she had been dreading having to bring her phone to Holly to begin with, given their last real conversation in the Music Club room... But now, she really wished she would have thought to ask Holly about it again, before the Festival. Except, on another level, she didn't. And she wasn't sure how to feel about that. She was having a hard time separating the Holly she knew from the one that had turned into a giant pumpkin and tried to kill everyone. Which was maybe even the same Holly she met in the Music Club room- a cold, evil, Holly that was on a path towards wanton destruction and terrible things, who liked hurting people. It was why she'd said all those horrible things to Bianca, and then to her- and it was why she had bullied Rin, if those rumors were true. Maybe Rochdale had changed Holly and replaced her with a villain. Just like something happened to Qiu'li and turned him evil and crazy too. She was just glad that Holly had been stopped before she'd hurt any more people. The few she had injured and killed at the Festival were a few too many, but luckily, the fire lady managed to stop her, and calm the crowds down afterwards, so no Grimm got past the city walls. They were lucky. This time. But that didn't mean the luck was going to last- she had to train harder, and be extra vigilant, because as she was slowly realizing, anyone could be evil and go on a rampage, and nobody would know who the bad guy was until people were being attacked. All this time, she had thought, and wanted to believe, that Grimm were the worst villains. And in many ways, they still were. But people who did things to attract the Grimm were even worse, because they were selfish and didn't usually even live long enough to see the horrible things they caused. She shook her head, inching ever closer to Jackie's door. No, she couldn't think like that. Not about Holly, anyways. As much as she tried to rationalize why they had to die so that they wouldn't do more horrible things, (no matter how much she hated the idea that anyone needed or deserved to die, at all) she spent equal amounts of mental energy trying to convince herself that maybe it was for the best. That maybe Qiu'li, and Ferric, and Solomon, and Holly were all better off now- clearly, they were all suffering horribly, and maybe all their evil deeds were a cry for help that was answered the same way, every time. Qiu'li killed himself by jumping on a big mountain monster. Ferric got killed by the scary robot arms and legs girl. Argent and Bianca killed Solomon in Kerch. And now Holly had been killed by some wolf girl who was maybe a Huntress or something. And in every case, now that they were dead, they weren't suffering anymore, because they were dead, and they were also not killing more people. Less dead people meant more not-dead people, after all, and that was a good thing. It just didn't feel like a good thing, when she was friends with three of Haven's lunatic psycho murderers. Because she'd known them before they went crazy and tried burning down villages, or turning civilians into fertilizer. Which kinda made her feel just a little hesitant towards most of her friendships at Haven- she knew Aegle wasn't likely to go punching people to death for fun, but she couldn't be too sure about everyone else. After all, she hadn't expected Holly to become a monster. Or Qiu'li. Or anyone! If she'd expected them to turn evil and kill a bunch of people, she'd have stopped them somehow, but she didn't, and she couldn't. So she just figured maybe she wouldn't get too close to anyone else for a while. Maybe forever. Which was silly, and impractical. At the very least, there needed to be some exceptions. Some people she could rule out as dangerous. Her teammates were some of them. She felt like she could trust Slate and Nasrin to be normal, not-murderers. Jackie... Well, Heidi... She wasn't really sure anymore. She was pretty certain they were friends. At least, Heidi didn't seem to want to punch her and throw her off a cliff and feed her to a Beowolf anymore. As much as she used to, at least. But out of everyone she knew at Haven, even Carmim could tell that Heidi was a little less than stable. When she got mad, things always seemed to turn really intense and sometimes violent, and while she hadn't gone around throwing random strangers through rooftops yet, there was always a possibility. Carmim was actually pretty sure that if there was another Haven psycho running around, waiting for a chance to blow up, it would be Heidi. Which would be terrifying, considering how brutal and effective she was in a fight. She'd be way better at it than Holly, or Qiu'li, or Ferric, or Solomon had ever been. The little redhead was, frankly, a little nervous about her much larger teammate. Though, it wasn't fair to put that on Jackie. It had taken quite a bit of time for Carmim to figure out that the two were the same person; an amount of time that she was still a little embarrassed by, considering the time she had spent around the both of them since they'd- well, Heidi'd, through Nasrin- recruited her for their Vytal team. But she still didn't really understand how the whole thing worked, aside from it being their Semblance. She did know, though, that what Heidi did, and how she was, wasn't something that Jackie had any control over. Or at least, she thought that was true, and no one had ever said anything to the contrary so far, so it seemed like a reasonable assumption. Jackie was kinda just pulled along by Heidi's need to go punch stuff and drink a lot and punch more stuff and make out with Nasrin and probably other people too. Which maybe wouldn't seem as bad, if it seemed like Jackie enjoyed that stuff too! Except, it didn't seem like that. Because she was fairly certain Jackie did not, in fact, enjoy that stuff. Except for maybe making out with Nasrin- she wasn't really sure if she did that, though, because if she did, it was probably not as public and in-your-face as Heidi was about it (and everything else she did), and Carmim hadn't really asked about it before, because she didn't really care one way or the other who either of them liked making out with. None of her business, really. Still, it put a different spin on her thinking about hypothetical Heidi the Civilian-Puncher scenarios. Because wouldn't Jackie just be a victim too, if someone had to kill Heidi to stop her from smashing people through cars and stuff? That wouldn't be okay. She blinked a few times, trying to clear her head. These were really weird, confusing, tiring, thoughts, and she was coming to see Jackie at least largely for something completely unrelated to the goings-on of her brain, in the form of getting her Scroll fixed. The T and Y keys were still bugging out, and now that she didn't have Holly around anymore to fix her Scroll for her, Jackie was looking to be her new Scroll mechanic of choice. Which was okay with her- despite being on a team together, she didn't feel like she'd ever really gotten to know Jackie much, in all the time they'd known each other, since way back during their first-year Midterms together. Which was the second part of why she was going over to see her- she wanted to just talk and see how Jackie was doing. Or well, she hoped it was going to be Jackie who opened the door. That was the tricky thing about their semblance; you never really knew what to expect. Shy, quiet, awkward, Jackie? Or scary, intimidating, intense Heidi? She hoped for Jackie, and brought up a fist to tap a little rhythmic knock on the well-worn door. "Are you home, Jackie? It is Carmim. I remembered you said you could help me wit' my Scroll? Are you busy?" And somehow, despite all else, she managed to only sound a little bit troubled and distant, in her tone, like she was anywhere other than standing in the middle of the Red Class hallway with a broken Scroll in her hand, and a head full of introspection and confusion, and what was very likely to be a few grey hairs she was sure would grow in the middle of her bright red mop of hair, if she kept on thinking about all of this stuff for much longer.

LAIKA OF GS!

[Jackie Bariole]

The faint chords of some muted music drifted through the close, still air of the dorm room, few of which were audible over the monotonous hum of the compressor working in one corner. Occasionally, a faintly louder sound, a metallic click here or a plastic rustle there, would intrude, but such rare instances were separated by tens of minutes where nothing at all seemed to move or change in the tiny space. There was an acrid tang in the air, built up over the course of many hours, from the few wisps of solder and cleaning agent which had escaped the compressor's pull, but there was also the tang of body odor, mostly sweat, and a whiff of spilled beer. From without, it would have been hard to tell if the room was even occupied. Even from within, it would have taken sharp eyes to spy the room's lone inhabitant from how little she moved. Jackie sat at the room's one desk, which marked the boundary of her 'side' of the room. It would have been wrong to call it her 'half' of the room, given how the desk also shared space with Jackie's bed, her parts cabinet, her tool cabinet, and her clothes trunk, all of which was crowded into a space barely wider than the atlesian's arm-span. It was all very neatly crowded into this space, and all arranged so that minimal movement and effort were required to access their respective contents, but left little space for anything else. Not that there wasn't plenty of space beyond Jackie's cramped workspace, which must also needs contain her chair and her bed. In fact, excluding the other bed the room contained and a few dozen articles of grimy, sweaty, discarded clothes, there was probably a dozen square meters of unoccupied space to work with. Except none of that space was Jackie's. All of it was on 'her' side of the room. The concept of sharing space with herself, and getting an unfair share at that, had long since ceased to be ridiculous to Jackie. Like so many other absurdities of her existence, it had become something she simply accepted and did her best to work within. Her other self hadn't always been so territorial; Given how little time she spent in the room, it wasn't like she needed all the space she'd determined to be hers. Yet, for a few months now, whenever Jackie's possession extended beyond her ordained 'side', her next turn-around would invariably find those possessions rudely placed back on her 'side', often in such a way as to discourage such similar trespasses in the future. Her tool cabinet still shrieked whenever she opened it, despite her best efforts to repair the hinge. So Jackie made do. She sat, hunched over the minute workspace on her desk which could be spared between all the other things the desk must contain, trying her best to move as little as was necessary to get the task done, lest she bang her elbows or brush her hand across a hot iron, as she had done numerous times already. Today's task wasn't a terribly complicated one anyway. She was putting together a new PCB for a dust-grenade she was designing. There were commercially available deployment options, but it was always cheaper to build than to buy, especially if this project paid off. A reusable deployment capsule, which could be recharged and refitted to hold a variety of dust types, would certainly save on development costs. Assuming this one actually worked. Jackie held her breath. Squinting through her microscope, the faint tremors of her heartbeat described huge movements of the iron's tip, magnified twenty five times, as she brought it towards the leads of the main IC. It was her own design, that IC, and had been built especially for reaction speed and durability, with not a micron wasted. She was especially proud of its resonance characteristics, which would produce a singular ignition without reacting with whatever agent it triggered. It was all about resonance when it came to dust, and a properly insulated chip was key to making her deployment device reusable. The only issue was that, in order to minimize resonance and maximize response speed, she'd needed to make it as small as possible. So small that soldering any one of its twenty four leads was akin to defusing a bomb. Should she apply too much solder, she would bridge the pins and the chip would burn out the first time it received power. Apply too little solder and the constant temperature changes the capsule would experience in the course of nominal operations would eventually pop the leads right off the PCB. Apply too much heat and the extremely delicate traces, which she hadn't the money to properly silk screen, would peel or, worse still, the traces inside the IC itself would oxidize. Too little heat, and the solder wouldn't wick properly and the leads would get a poor connection. It was good that she was on the second to last pin. Had to she opted for a less compact thirty-two pin form factor, she was sure her heart would give out before pin twenty six. Just as Jackie was about to touch the iron to the twenty third pin, a knocking at her door made her jump. Her iron pressed down between two previously soldered pins with an audible hiss. In less time than it took to blink, a silvery blob of solder extended from one pin to the other, bridging them. Jackie yanked her hand back, but the damage was already done and the only thing she accomplished was to jab herself in her other hand with the iron's tip. Yelping, Jackie slammed her iron back into its cradle and recoiled back and out of her chair, then half tripped over her tool cabinet before just about falling through the closed window opposite her desk. She caught herself with her burnt hand, grabbing the frame instead, then staggered half a step before she slumped, breathing heavily, against the wall. Her had pulsed hotly where she'd stabbed it, while her heel adopted a more bruised kind of ache where it had made contact with her tool cabinet. "Ffffffffffffffff-..." Jackie hissed through gritted teeth, eyes squeezed shut, as she tried not to scream in shock and pain. "F-fiddlesticks." she finally forced out, before daring to open her eyes and inspect the damage. It didn't look like much, just a bit of white and red where she'd stabbed herself, more like a callous than a burn, but it sure hurt enough. She looked next to the door, the erstwhile source of her most recent miseries, and felt her jaw tighten. Why was someone bothering her, and why did they have to do it at the exact moment when it would do the most possible harm? Why couldn't people mind their own business? Was it too much to ask to just be left alone?! She should really give them a piece of her mind. Better yet, she should grab the iron and see how they liked being burnt with it. Chest tight, jaw set, hand and foot aching, Jackie threw herself off the wall and lunged for the door. The door opened the tiniest crack, barely wide enough for one mud-brown eye to be visible to Carmim beyond. "H-hello?" Jackie's voice trickled out, creaky and faint from several hours of disuse. Seeing a familiar face, in so much as it was a face she belonging to someone unlikely to mock or intimidate her, Jackie opened the door a tiny bit wider, so that now a little under half of her face was visible. Her faintly tan skin gleamed in the hallway light which filtered through her partly open door, a sheen of grease and sweat giving it an unhealthy glow. "Oh, Carmim, it's you..." The Atlesian said after a pause just long and pregnant enough to achieve peak awkwardness. Despite being significantly taller than Carmim, Jackie didn't meet the redhead's eyes for long, but instead hastily averted her gaze to what Carmim was holding. A few snatches of what Carmim had said during Jackie's foibles finally clicked in the Atlesian's head. She'd almost forgotten about offering to repair her scroll, in so much as Jackie was really capable of 'forgetting' anything. After yet another pause exactly long enough to make the interaction as stilted as possible, Jackie closed her door again. She wasn't entirely sure why she did it. She knew Carmim, had even been on a team with her for Vytal, little as it might have felt like that. She knew why Carmim was there, and it was to take Jackie up on an offer she'd made months prior. Jackie stared at the closed door and felt the anger and frustration she'd felt a few moments prior tangling itself up with the knot of anxiety freshly forming in her stomach. Her burn hand clenched tightly on the door handle, like she was trying to crush it. She didn't want to deal with this right now. She didn't want to have to interact with someone she knew only slightly better than a stranger off the street. Not that she ever really wanted to deal with other people. Just about the only person in the academy she was even slightly comfortable with was Nasrin, and even interactions with her were exhausting. Jackie looked around her dorm room, not unlike a trapped rat seeking some route of escape, but all she saw was the familiar delineation separating her 'side' from the other side. The mess of crumpled clothes, the eschew bed with unmade sheets, the tipped over bottle of beer in the corner, beside the neat, orderly, and painfully compact arrangement of tools and supplies. Jackie didn't want to let Carmim see her room. She didn't want to be worrying about what Carmim might think of her if she did. Most of all, she just wanted to get back to work and fix what she'd so recently broken. But simply ignoring Carmim and locking the door took more courage than Jackie could muster. The very thought of leaving the redhead outside and untended to caused an entirely different and distinct knot of anxiety to tie itself in her stomach, where it sat, heavy as a lead weight, right beside the other. The door opened again. At first, it was so narrow that nothing could be seen of the room's interior. Then, all at once, it swung open to reveal a chagrinned and embarrassed looking Jackie, who stood with shoulders hunched and eyes set determinedly on the floor at her feet. Despite the fact that she'd been alone in her room, Jackie was dressed as though she was about to go to class. Her outfit was plain and nondescript, with a long skirt, long sleeves, and a high collar, hiding as much of her body as it was possible to hide. "Sorry about that..." Jackie said quietly. She thought about explaining her actions as having needed to quickly throw something decent on, but the thought of suggesting she'd been indecent when she first opened the door stopped her. So, instead, Jackie let her strange actions go ahead unexplained, which was only marginally less stressful and anxiety inducing. With how wide she'd opened the door, Carmim was afforded a pretty unobstructed view of Jackie's dorm room, though her own living space within said room was so restricted that not much of it was viewable from the hallway. After a pause, Jackie peeled her hands off the door and clutched them demurely before her stomach. She adopted a pose which would have looked at home in any finishing school, were it not for how hunched up she held her shoulders or how much she bowed her head. It took another pause before she stepped silently back from the door, though whether this was to allow Carmim access to the room or merely put some extra distance between them was left extremely unclear. "I..." Jackie began, but her face flushed deeply before she could say a second word. The source of her embarrassment was left unexplained for a few seconds before she hastily kicked an extremely sheer, frilly, and decidedly un-Jackie thong towards the otherside of the room. "Please come in?" Jackie finally squeaked, though she turned the invitation into a question at the very last moment for reasons she couldn't even begin to comprehend, much less explain. "I'll give your scroll an examination; I know some possible causes for your input issues..."

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Words - 2,091
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[Carmim Clover]

❝ AURA: 100% WORDS: 1566 | TWC: 3349 HAVE YOU SEEN HER? HAVE YOU HEARD? THE WAY SHE MOVES, THERE ARE NO WORDS While the music softly playing beyond the door told her that it was occupied, it wasn't until Jackie's yelp startled her that she was sure the right occupant was home. She doubted Heidi would be very much help with this- she'd probably just take her Scroll and throw it out the window, then throw her out the window too, and then come outside and pick her up and rope her into a drinking contest or something. So fortunately for her, the more level-headed of the two seemed to be home. And in pain? Hopefully she hadn't fallen out the window, or poked her eye out on something pointy. Probably stubbed her toe on the door or something, it happened to Carmim all the time. Said door opened a sliver, so slightly that the redhead wasn't at first sure if it had been opened at all- then a wee bit more, which left her with a razor-thin peek into Jackie's room, most of which was taken up by a lonely, solitary, eyeball (and the face it was thankfully still attached to) peering back at her. Yep. That was Jackie, alright. Carmim offered her a smile, but it was a faded one, weighed down by a lot more troubles than usually befell the Vacuoan's features. With a head full of Holly, and big thoughts, and bigger questions, she was noticeably less bubbly than usual. "Hi Jackie. It is me." The silence was awkward, and uncomfortable as Jackie just kinda stood there, behind the crack in the door. Were Carmim any more adept at normal social etiquette than she was, she probably would have thought to ask if this was a bad time, and make her leave right then, but as it were, she was not, and more importantly, she still needed her Scroll fixed anyways, so walking off wouldn't really help any. Instead, she just stared at Jackie as the other girl zoned out staring at her Scroll. Was she drunk? Carmim could smell her room through the little opening, and it definitely smelled like a bar. She knew that, for a fact, because she had tagged along to a few of Heidi and Nasrin's bar crawls, once, and the smell was decidedly not her favorite. Then the door creaked shut, as she was just beginning to suspect that maybe Jackie had gotten into her other half's booze stash. Not quite a slam, as much as a soft click, though- it was always whimpers, never bangs, with her. In fact, Carmim was pretty sure she'd never heard Jackie so much as raise her voice- maybe she didn't know how? Or maybe Heidi just took all the loudness and confidence and action away from her, and left her with nothing but shyness and anxiety. Poor thing. "Jackie...?" As much as she felt bad for the other girl, though, she was getting a little frustrated with the lack of communication going on. Why did she just close the door without saying anything? She pressed her eyes closed and wordlessly counted to ten. She didn't have any real reason to get irritated with Jackie; she was just upset about everything that had been going on lately, and she hadn't had a good outlet for those emotions yet. Plus, in her haste to get her Scroll looked at, she had almost forgotten that she was also on a mission to check up on Jackie, and actually hold a proper conversation with her friend for once. Assuming Jackie would actually let her, that is. Her fist was up to knock on the door again, right when it came inching open once more, seeming to linger just as wide as it had been opened the first time, to Carmim's steadily increasing frustration, when Jackie seemed to have a change of heart, and pulled it open further. She could now see the brunette in all of her greasy, poor-postured, glory. Which she didn't mind, of course- far be it from the girl dating Haven's resident lumpy hunchback gremlin to go judging anyone else by their outward appearances. She noticed those sorts of things, of course, but rarely did they ever have much sway on her first impressions of people. There were more important things that went into making a person than how much they looked like a model. Plus, Jackie sometimes did look like a model! Well... Heidi did, anyways. Which was sort of like Jackie? It was still confusing, and frankly, her head was full of so many more pressing issues, there wasn't room to consider Jackie and Heidi's individual personhood. She just mentally accepted that Jackie looking like a model when she was Heidi still counted as Jackie sometimes being drop-dead gorgeous, and left it at that. Jackie apologized for being weird, which Carmim accepted at face value, because asking why she was being weird seemed rude, and would probably just freak her out or something. Jackie did seem to have a much weaker constitution than most, so the last thing she wanted to do was hurt her feelings! Seemed like the world did that to her enough, as it was. Instead, she just peeked past Jackie at the other girl's room, which was probably also kinda rude to do, but she was genuinely curious- she couldn't really remember ever seeing it before, and had always kinda wondered what it was like. Turns out, it was pretty boring, at least from the bits she could see. Also really messy- her own room wasn't the tidiest, between her forgetting to take out the trash sometimes, and Aegle scattering her things everywhere, but this was just really gross. Dirty laundry on the floor, and beer bottles and cans tossed around. The smell was also a lot stronger, as she followed Jackie inside. She probably wouldn't have noticed the thong if its owner hadn't kicked it to the side, but now that she was aware of it, her mind briefly explored the possibility that maybe Jackie wasn't as timid and reserved as she thought she was... Before she remembered that it was most likely Heidi's lingerie. Still, part of her hoped that at least Jackie's underwear choices were exciting. She needed something to contrast the quiet boringness that she usually gave off. Wait! No, that was mean. Jackie wasn't boring anyways. She was just quiet, and hard to talk to, and avoided people, places, and situations, for the most part. But she was really smart, and she knew lots of cool stuff, even if Carmim never really understood most of it. It was just a little hard to think of her as an interesting person when she was living in the shadow of such a huge, massive, dominant, personality. She looked up again, since it sounded like Jackie was talking to her. She hadn't really even heard her, even with her better hearing, since she was so damn quiet. The music playing in the background was louder than she was talking, which said a lot. Though now that she was thinking about that, she figured maybe that'd be a good place to start with some small talk. To maybe alleviate at least a little of the awkwardness in the air. She stepped fully into the room, and handed Jackie her Scroll so the other girl could inspect it. "T'ank you... I do not know what I would do wit'out you, haha. Especially since um. You know. Holly..." And now seemed like a good time for that abrupt little icebreaker, now that she was feeling considerably worse than she had been before she'd started talking about how Jackie was the second-choice replacement for her recently dead friend! "So, what are you listening to?" Her voice was a little more urgent than it really needed to be, considering the subject of the question. Which was almost even intentional! There was approximately zero percent of her that wanted to linger on the topic of dead Holly being dead right then, and even less of her wanted to put Jackie in a position where she'd have to try and comfort or console Carmim. Mostly because she was pretty sure she'd be bad at it. And the stress from sucking at being a good emotional support person might trigger her transformation thing. And then Heidi would get annoyed at her for being sad about her dead friend, and would throw her and her Scroll out the window... So it seemed like a pretty good idea to not drag down Jackie's mood any. Aside from not wanting to upset Jackie, for its own merits, she was also very interested in self-preservation. Which meant a better distraction was probably needed. As Jackie hopefully answered her first question, she began looking around the room for literally anything to spin into more conversational material, since she figured Jackie would probably be pretty bad at that too. Oof. No, that was mean too. Carmim felt a twinge of guilt at her own thoughts, even though she didn't exactly think she was wrong about any of them. This wasn't how friends thought about other friends, though. Maybe it would be a little different if she didn't feel so exhausted with the world. She at least hoped her internal rudeness stayed internal- considering her and Jackie's first meeting, she didn't really want to end up yelling at her again.

LAIKA OF GS!

[Jackie Bariole]

Wincing as she took the scroll with her burnt hand, Jackie shuffled half a step back from the smaller woman and half turned towards her desk. Old instincts kept her from completely turning her back on Carmim, the mere thought of doing so caused her spine to tingle uncomfortably, so she affected an awkward pose whereby she could examine the scroll, her desk, and her tools without letting the intruder into her personal space out of her peripheral vision. It wasn't fair to Carmim, who'd been unusually kind to Jackie during their infrequent acquaintance, but habits were habits for a reason. Mention of Holly made Jackie wince again, shoulders tightening up like a dagger had just plunged into them. Jackie knew few people, and even fewer people well, and her association with Holly had been briefer than most, but she'd seemed like an earnest girl. A bit awkward, but no more so than Jackie herself, and a bit difficult to read, more so than most, but she'd never seemed like the sort to do the things everyone was saying she did. Jackie shied from those thoughts. Thinking about Holly and everything that had happened to her and all she'd done made Jackie feel like she was jumping into an icy pool. Her heart lurched in her chest and her skin felt blistering hot and frigidly cold by turns. Nasrin hated Holly, and had acted like all that had happened with her was merely a matter of time. Something about Haven just seemed to breed psychopaths and sociopaths, and it hadn't surprised the punkette at all when Holly had turned out to be the former. Naturally, Jackie didn't respond to what Carmim said about Holly, with the not unreasonable assumption that the smaller woman would drop the topic like reacting dust if she did not receive a reply. Of course, Jackie also heard the implications behind what her erstwhile guest said, the fact that Holly would have been her preference for mechanical problems in the past. Jackie wasn't surprised by this; Only one person in the whole academy came to her with their problems, and she wasn't Carmim. Part of Jackie preferred it that way; She didn't know Carmim, not well, and she often found the smaller woman overwhelming in her bubbly optimism and apparently inexhaustible enthusiasm. Both things which seemed more subdued in that moment than usual, but still far too apparent for Jackie's liking. Carmim, so affable and friendly as she was, was also far too naïve for Jackie to actually like. Which was honestly quite tragic; Carmim, who was kind and supportive, seemed a positively wonderful person. She was also, so far as Jackie could tell, quite the idiot and far, far too trusting. Both qualities which would end up getting her hurt or worse, and Jackie couldn't stand to be around people like that. She couldn't stand to grow attached to people like that. She wasn't stupid, she wasn't trusting, she knew how badly bad attachments could hurt her. Just look at what had happened with Carmim and Holly. Just look at what was going to happen with Carmim and Aegle. Nothing good came from giving people the benefit of the doubt. Nothing good came from getting attached. What was the point, when it would just end up with you getting yourself hurt? 'As though you haven't attached yourself to Nasrin,' Jackie heard in her head, the tone mocking and accusatory, 'As though you don't know it's just a matter of time before she finds someone else.' But then that was nothing new; Jackie had always been terrible at following her own advice. Distracted by her own frustratingly fatalistic train of thought, Jackie almost didn't hear Carmim when she asked after the music she was listening to. "Maigre Chiot's no. seven, 'Final Rights', in C." Jackie muttered mechanically, without actually considering or even noticing the deeper implications of the question. It was one of the more contemporary compositions she listened to, though Chiot had still been quite before her time. Such orchestral music wasn't popular outside of Mantle, from what she'd seen, so she rather doubted that someone so painfully provincial as Carmim would know a Chiot from a Nails, much less care about the distinction of Chiot's seventh. The seventh had been described as unusually bleak, even when compared to the rest of Chiot's dark body of work, but Jackie had always found it helped her think. Perhaps that was because Heidi disliked most classical compositions, and especially despised anything as gloomy as Chiot tended to be, and so mostly left Jackie alone whenever she was listening to it. In the time she'd been thinking about Chiot, Jackie had already opened Carmim's scroll and exposed the fine circuitry within and begun examining it for any obvious signs of damage or malfunction. The components were all of a small form factor, all surface mounted, so as to fit in the confined space they were allotted. While there wasn't considerably overlap between consumer electronics and weapons systems, the scrolls circuitry was far smaller and more complex than anything Jackie would build for herself, there were commonalities and, therefore, common points of failure. She saw no signs of water damage, no signs of shorting or oxidation, no misaligned or damaged components, and no leakage. There was a bit of grit in the case, what appeared to be sand, of all things, but not so much of it as to effect the scroll's functionality. All in all, the scrolled seemed to be in good, even excellent condition, considering the person it belonged to. Part of Jackie had expected to open the case only to find the interior smeared with peanut butter and jam. Jackie winced again. That wasn't fair. Carmim wasn't an apex of intelligence, true, but she was hardly its nadir. Closing the case, guilt heavy as stone in her stomach, the mantlian opened Carmim's scroll and navigated her way to its debug menu. Without any obvious cause for the issues, she would need to eliminate the firmware as a possible culprit, and so she began a diagnostic. Such a diagnostic should only take a few minutes, which was why Jackie was surprised to see an estimated time to completion in excess of ten. Closing her eyes, Jackie repressed a groan. She didn't want to begin probing the circuitry when the issue could be the result of coding, but she also didn't want to spend ten minutes in silence with Carmim hovering over her shoulder. Such terrible luck... "I've begun a system's diagnostic," Jackie explained quietly, opening her eyes once again, though she did not look at Carmim. "I can given you a better idea as to the cause of your issues once it is complete. It should take ten to fifteen minutes." Though the diagnostic time already pointed to a software issue of some kind, such slow down could also be the result of failing mechanical parts. Jackie considered whether she even had the means to repair the scroll's random access memory if that was somehow at fault. Then again, she did not know how failing memory could cause specific button keys to stop working. Perhaps there was an issue in the virtual construct of the scroll's keyboard. She knew that there could be mechanical and software issues which might cause bad instructions from the virtual keyboard, though she hadn't seen any faulty capacitors in her initial inspection. Depending on what the diagnostic told her, she might need to reimage the whole device, just to eliminate clog-code as a potential cause. She didn't really want to do that, but had prepared a file-dump for the purpose. Feeling awkward, Jackie placed the scroll, its screen aglow, on her desk beside what she'd been working on prior to Carmim's arrival. Wordlessly, she switched off her hot-iron, then scooped up the circuit board beside it and inspected the damage caused when Carmim had knocked on the door. She couldn't make out the bridged pins without magnification, but she could see where her iron had smoked the silk-screen. Heart sinking, she grabbed some copper wool, spritzed the board with some strong smelling flux remover, and began delicately polishing away the scorch marks. The polish would make it easier to see what needed fixing when she resumed work on the board. She felt a stab of resentment towards Carmim for her intrusion, which coiled around the blame she had already laid on the smaller woman for the interruption and inconvenience she had caused. Jackie immediately felt guilty, reminding herself that she had offered to help, but that just made her feel bad. It did nothing to stop her from wishing Carmim had just forgotten the offer and left her alone. She knew the next half hour or so was going to be unpleasant for her. She was acutely aware of how little she'd actually said to Carmim since her arrival, how little she'd actually tried to fill the capacious silence which stretched between them, and how disinclined she was to rectify her behavior. The fact was that, which she had plenty of things she might have wanted to say to Carmim, she was not especially motivated to say any of them out loud. As much as the awkward silence pressed on her, with all the weight of expectation which came with being in someone else's presence, she was neither comfortable nor confident enough to break it. She wasn't even sure what she might have said if she had the nerve to say anything, or that Carmim would appreciate her clumsy overtures at conversation if she had. After all, Carmim probably had things on her mind other than small talk with Jackie, things which Jackie was incapable of helping her with. That caused Jackie a stab of anxiety and a twinge of sympathy. As much as she knew it was a bed of Carmim's own making, the hurt she was probably feeling over what had happened with Holly, it didn't mean she wanted Carmim to feel that way. Ideally, nobody should have to feel the way Carmim was probably feeling right then. Jackie wondered how much Holly's death shaken Carmim's world view, and if she might not be looking at other parts of her life with eyes now capable of seeing all the other things which could hurt her. Her potential career as a huntress, for example, or her childish romance with the class' captain. Jackie winced again, suddenly deeply sad for Carmim. As much as she resented the small woman's naivete, there was something tragic in its loss. Remnant had so few people as earnest and kind as Carmim, after all. It hardly seemed worth losing one more, just so Jackie would feel vindicated in her own unpleasantly repressed world view... 'You're a pathetic, indecisive mess.' She was, at that. Jackie kept quiet. Without prompting, she would probably keep quiet until the diagnostic was finished, regardless of how awfully awkward the intervening silence became.

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Words - 1,831
Total - 3,922

[Carmim Clover]

❝ AURA: 100% WORDS: 1303 | TWC: 4652 HAVE YOU SEEN HER? HAVE YOU HEARD? THE WAY SHE MOVES, THERE ARE NO WORDS She had almost forgotten how painful it was to hold any attempt at a prolonged conversation with Jackie. It brought her back to the very first conversation they'd shared. The one in which Jackie took very few words to dismiss her praise and thanks, with well-practiced self-deprecation and incredible deflection skills, and then left Carmim waiting in an unbearably awkward silence as she mulled over the very simple request of friendship the little redhead had offered her. Interacting with Jackie was hard. Which she, again, felt bad for feeling, but it was true, and she would be lying to herself, to think otherwise. Jackie was hard to talk to, which explained why she only really seemed to have two friends. And both of them were muleheaded and persistent at inflicting their friendship on the poor girl. But even then, it always seemed to Carmim that Nasrin preferred Heidi, although she did definitely seem to care about Jackie a great deal as well. And frankly, Carmim almost preferred talking with Heidi too. Which she felt somehow worse, about, because there was no reason she should enjoy talking to Jackie any less than talking to Heidi. By all accounts, Jackie was a much nicer person, even though that wasn't a very low bar to meet. And at the very least, Jackie only ever seemed to wish Carmim would go away, as opposed to actively shooing her away when she found her presence intolerable enough. And yet, Heidi seemed a preferable option. At least with Heidi, silences weren't awkward and uncomfortable- they were tense, and while still uncomfortable, they were uncomfortable in a different sort of way. They were bearable, at least, and when they ended, Carmim was left with some sense of relief. No relief came when Jackie broke her silences- only a string of words that Carmim didn't recognize, and an almost immediate return to the abyssal void of emptiness, broken only by the dismal strings and piano pouring from the speaker across the room, a lone trumpet- or a flugelhorn, perhaps, though Carmim would certainly never be able to tell the difference- gently piercing the thick, heavy, chords with a lonely, aching, melody. Jackie was right to assume that her answer was little better than worthless to the Vacuoan- despite being in Mistral for several years now, she was still only just getting used to the concept of music being discussed in the context of a song's title and its composer or singer's name. In her village, there were a great number of songs, both local, and taken into cultural memory from the other nomadic tribes that Bulaani encountered, but none of them were referenced by the name of the artist, and not all of them were even known by name, necessarily. The much more rigid structure of a classical composition's designation was thus far more foreign to her ears than Jackie had even assumed- there was no question as to the distinction between a Chiot and a Nails, as she wasn't even sure which part was supposed to be the name, and which part the title. Never mind what "in C" meant, or what the first six Magry Sheeos were. "Oh. It sounds nice." It didn't sound especially nice, not to her ears- it sounded terribly sad and very strange, with musical textures she was not accustomed to, harmonies that were far too complex for her taste, and a disorienting fluctuation of tempo that made the whole thing sound very ethereal and hollow. But she wasn't just going to say that Jackie's music didn't sound very good. For one, that would be unnecessarily mean, and for two, she just figured it was her own lack of familiarity with the genre that made it sound so bad. Actually, upon further reflection, she almost immediately regretted bringing it up as an avenue of discussion in the first place, as there simply wasn't any way to continue that conversation without things being incredibly awkward for one, or both, of them. Luckily, it seemed that Jackie was content to drop it as quickly as it had begun. Much like most topics, actually. Jackie didn't seem to enjoy talking very much. Which was uncomfortable for Carmim, who resigned herself to fidgeting, rapping her fingertips against the doorframe and her thigh as she watched Jackie do... something. It was Scroll stuff that Carmim didn't understand, so she just watched, not really comprehending enough to follow along, as she waited for some kind of communication. Any communication, actually- it was too quiet, and the strings were getting really screechy in the ambient background music. Was this what Jackie listened to, to relax? Unfamiliarity with this kind of music or not, she was pretty sure nobody was supposed to find this very relaxing. Finally, just before the little redhead could consider just speaking up about something else terribly mundane and uninteresting, like the bedsheets, or her curtains, Jackie broke the silence again. Thankfully. Unfortunately, it wasn't great news. Because it meant more silence. Ten or fifteen minutes. An eternity, as far as she was concerned. She simply nodded, in response, however. "Oh. Alright." There was a brief span of maybe a minute and a half or so, in which Carmim contented herself to just stand idly in place, where she had been since she'd come in, but soon enough, the discomfort from standing around, looming by Jackie's side as she worked on some other project got to her, and she sought somewhere to sit instead. Finding few better options, she stepped quietly over to sit on the bed opposite Jackie's side of the room. The mattress felt like someone had pounded it in with a hammer, and she was acutely aware of the stench of beer and sweat lingering above the half-made bed. It seemed this day was going to be filled with regrets, no matter what she tried to do to occupy herself. She wished she had stayed on the other side of the room, where it smelled a little better. Her own room wasn't the tidiest, by any stretch, but she at least picked up her dirty clothes, and wiped it up if she spilled something. She immediately felt a twinge of shame for judging Jackie's room, even if it was an honest impression. It was gross, but that still wasn't her place to judge. Besides, she had a feeling that it wasn't entirely Jackie's fault. Still, with little to examine in the messy, funky, room, Carmim was left only to dwell on her own thoughts. Which she was trying to avoid doing, actually, so instead of that, she tried staring at her hands. And then at the floor. At her feet. At the ceiling. At Jackie, briefly. At the beer bottle on the nightstand, open and half-drunk. At her Scroll, still lying on Jackie's desk. Eleven minutes remaining. She couldn't take it anymore. This was unbearable. About four and a half minutes in, she couldn't help but speak up, willing to try damn near anything to bring an end to her silent suffering. "What are you working on?" Immediate regret, again. She knew that whatever Jackie's response was, it was incredibly likely to fly right over her head anyways. There was no real point in asking, because she wouldn't understand the answer. She kicked herself mentally for bringing it up at all, she was probably just annoying her while she was working. But she didn't have any other choice- her next best idea was humming, and she doubted very much that Jackie would have appreciated that for very long. At least a stilted, awkward, difficult, conversation was better than her making noise for noise's sake, until Jackie finally gathered the nerve to toss her out, Scroll and all. Barely better, but better.

LAIKA OF GS!

[Jay]

XP Distribution:

Carmim Clover: 46 XP
267 + 46 = 313 XP