fandomtownies | The Beach, Friday Afternoon

"Less crowded," Elena agreed, taking the glass and waiting for Karla to pour her own before sipping. "There aren't sunbathers out pushing for space, so we can just enjoy the sound of the waves."

She reached over to snag a grape and popped it into her mouth.

"This was an awesome idea," she said. "Coming here, today, I mean."

"I woke up and just wanted--somewhere open, I guess," Karla said, pouring herself a glass, too. "Somewhere I could just relax. I thought of the beach and then remembered we'd never had our day out and decided today was the day." She slanted a grin Elena's way. "Unless you were busy. Then some other day would be the day."

"Not busy," Elena promised with a laugh. "Heading home for part of the weekend, but that's a personal trip, not business. And anyway I'm not leaving until tomorrow."

She took a light sip from her glass, letting the taste of it roll around in her mouth. "I can't get over the smell out here. Just ... the ocean, and the sand, and the sky. Everything seems new and a little raw."

"For me, it's the ocean," Karla said, looking out over it. "It's so immense and old and powerful. It's just...kind of amazing to me. I don't think I'll ever get bored with this sight." She idly grabbed an apple and started cutting it, offering Elena some of the pieces. "I'd never seen the ocean before I got here. Plenty of beaches, because of the lochs. I'd read about the sea, but..." She shook her head. "I didn't imagine it would be like this."

"I was usually on-duty, when I got to see the ocean," she said, a light smile playing on her lips. "Crossing it in a huge barge, but we had to guard the President and so on. Sometimes we'd have down time at the beach, but not very often."

Edited 2009-11-13 23:21 (UTC)

This was probably as good an opening as ever. "Hey, Elena, I have some questions and I think you might be the best person to answer them," Karla said tentatively. "Ummm...but I might come across as an idiot when I start asking, because I don't really know much about it. And I also don't want to come across being an ass, you know? So let me know if I am, okay?"

Babble harder, Karla

Elena took a sip from her glass and then set it down in the sand. She needed a couple of seconds to watch the ocean and gather her thoughts.

"This is about class yesterday, isn't it?"

Edited 2009-11-13 23:58 (UTC)

Karla nodded. "A little bit," she replied. "You made a comment about what it was like growing up for you. In the slums. Could--could you tell me about them?" She glanced down at her wine. "I'm not asking out of idle curiosity. Until I went to Dinah's city, I'd never even seen a slum. Hadn't heard of them till you first mentioned them."

She also turned to watch the ocean. "When I go home and make the Offering, my uncle will have been ruling for over ten years. I already know that he's been running Glacia into the ground. I was sheltered, after my parents' death. I lived with the coven for years, learning from them, but even as isolated as we were, I knew things were changing. For the worse. I don't know what I'll be going home to. But I'll need to know how to fix it."

Elena had expected this to be a question about her job. The slums, on the other hand ...

She pulled her knees in toward her chest, thinking.

"So you ... you want to know what's probably going on, there," she said. "In your home, with the city falling apart. So you know what to expect."

Karla nodded. "I need know what's happening. What it's like for the people living there. What I can do to fix it. They're my people and I need to know as much as I can. And you lived it. You've got insight no one else here does."

"I doubt I'm the only one," Elena stated, lifting her shoulders and deciding where to start.

"The slums. You're poor. Everyone you know is. If you weren't poor, you'd live somewhere else. Anywhere else. People end up in the slums because they have no other options. There aren't a lot of ways out, either.

"You carry a weapon, and you learn to walk with a good fuck-off vibe. Because if you look like a target, then you'll be a target. Everyone's poor, and that means everyone's desperate. Someone who hasn't eaten in two days has nothing to lose and everything to gain by knocking you to the ground and stealing your wallet. Or jamming a knife into your ribs while you're down.

"There are junkies. Some of them used to have nice jobs and houses but they're addicts, now, so they're here. Some of them are junkies because they'd rather get high than be hungry, and they just don't give a damn any more.

"So there are dealers. You sell, you make money, you eat. And you hire a couple of guys to watch your back, so you don't get knifed in your sleep for your stash. Better make sure you pay them well and treat them better, or they'll be the ones holding the knife.

"And the whores. Some of them are old and wrinkled up. Some of them are too fucking young. They go with you into a back alley, and they get money, and that means food, or smack, or whatever it is they can't get any other way. Turn off your dignity, swallow your pride, because it's not like you fucking have that much, anyway, if you ended up here."

She was now fumbling in her pockets for a cigarette. Hopefully the other girl wouldn't mind; she needed the nicotine, and badly. "So when someone drops a rescue ladder in front of you, you don't ask questions. You take it, and you get the fuck out."

"Maybe you aren't," Karla said quietly, "but I only can think of one or two others. I don't want to just go around asking casually, and...I'm not sure the others that I'm thinking about would be willing to talk to me about it."

She wasn't sure if George would believe her interest came from a desire to help her people and not some wierd aristo trainwreck fascination or something.

Karla listened in silence to Elena's explanation. Part of it was because she'd asked for this explanation and Elena deserved her respect of her full attention, and part of it was that she was trying to understand difficult and slightly foreign concepts. Some of what Elena said made sense and lined up with some of the things she'd seen back home. Other concepts were completely alien to her (smack?). And, still others, were similar in concept but not what Karla knew. She'd seen whores, had snuck into a Red Moon House as a matter of fact, but had only ever seen the high priced whores who served the aristo Blood. She'd never thought about people too poor to serve in a House, or even those Houses which didn't have to cater to the splendor and opulence the aristos were used to.

"It sounds horrible," Karla said, sounding matter-of-fact and not sympathetic. She was sympathetic, but sympathy sounded an awful lot like pity sometimes. And pity wasn't really Karla's style. "May I ask what your ladder was? Whatever it was--I'm just glad it got you out."

Elena lit her cigarette and inhaled, deeply. Ah, nicotine. Good for those pinches of raw nerves.

"It is horrible," Elena agreed, easily. "And ... I was recruited from the military academy a couple of years ago."

Dilemma: how much to explain. She took a deep breath and tried to weigh the risk against the relief of just having it all out.

"Elite group, black ops. All the horrible, unethical stuff you can imagine, and probably some you can't." She lifted her shoulders, again, blowing out a fine column of smoke. "The pay was good, the group watches out for its own, and I'd never have to live in a hellhole again. I said yes."

Karla wasn't entirely sure what 'black ops' meant, but from some of Elena's answers in class, she could probably hazard a few guesses. There also probably wasn't a better time for Elena to have told Karla this, either. With everything still skewed by her memories of Briarwood, she wasn't as put off by that as she might have been otherwise. However, since she didn't think that Elena had been playing uncle to a 'mental asylum' for young girls, she came off glowingly in comparison.

"I'm still just glad you got out," she repeated firmly, offering Elena more wine. "And I think it sums up exactly why I wanted to have this conversation. I don't want my people to have to take any ladder someone offers them just to get a chance at a better life. My job is to make sure they all have a shot at that, no matter what."

Don Corneo had been bad enough, but at least his girls were legal, and willing participants. Most of ShinRa's sins had been of a large scale, against groups and the planet itself, and less individuals.

"That's a harder question," Elena said, taking another sip of her wine. She couldn't pretend she wasn't relieved, and that bothered her: she shouldn't care what other people thought about her job. This island was getting to her.

"What they need is probably the basics: actual medical care, jobs, shelters for people sleeping in the street. The problem is how to handle it. If you swoop in like Princess La-de-da the Generous, they'll refuse on principal. They'll hate you and tell you to shove your help right up your ass. It's ridiculous, sure, because to you, you're trying to help, but to them ... it's hard to explain."

Karla didn't really have to question the why's of that. She knew how often her own damn pride got her to do or say stupid things. That didn't exactly make her an expert on how to offer that help though.

"Do you have a suggestion about how to approach them then? You didn't get angry with your group when they offered those things, right? How did they present it?"

"They offered me a job," she said, reaching for another handful of grapes. "A job isn't charity, it's work. It means you earn what you take. Bring jobs into the area -- real ones, not just busy make-work that someone comes up with as an excuse to pay people. Education, too. You didn't need a military background to join the Turks, but going to the academy opened a lot of doors for me. Set up programs to teach people trades, things like that."

She frowned, then fished in one of her pockets for her phone. "This is going to sound ridiculous," she said, "but do you want someone's phone number? A friend, from home. He lived in a worse part than I did, and he's working on rebuilding while I'm here, working on my nonexistent tan."

She'd already outed herself; no reason not to pull Reno into the mix. She'd apologize later if it bothered him, but Reno collected rookies anyway.

Karla had called in a small notebook and was busily taking notes. "Does repairing the building and keeping the streets clean count as make-work or real work?" she asked, glancing up. "We'll need more schools, more Healer's stations...people can work building those, I'm sure. But what do do about all the, uhh, junkies...?"

Elena's offer of a phone number took her by surprise. "Rebuilding, you say? Is he trying to improve the slums back in your world, too?"

Karla: one track mind sometimes.

"Rebuilding's legitimate," Elena nodded. "It's also in how you present it. Someone acting like they're doing the slum workers a huge favor in giving them jobs, they should be lucky to have work, that's going to get people's backs up. Junkies need medical treatment, but some of them won't get better until or unless they want to. That's just how it goes."

Elena bit her lower lip, wondering how to phrase the rest of this.

"The slums are gone," she said. "So is the topside full of rich people. The whole city was destroyed. All the survivors are living on the outskirts of town, foraging scrap metal from the wreckage, trying to stay alive. The ground's too polluted to grow anything, so food has to be brought in. It's not the slums I grew up in, but it's not all that different. He's ... trying to help."

She stopped short and cut Karla a quick look. "Do you know a student named Zack Fair?"

"That makes sense. On the one hand, going in like they should be grateful to me for letting them do this will just piss people off. But so will going in and expecting them to just fall into line. I have to strike a balance." Karla was writing furiously, her wine hanging in the air off to the right, completely forgotten for the moment.

Which was why it took a minute for Elena's words to register. "It...what?" she asked, gaping. "Gone? Everything's just...gone? What could do that?"

The question about Zack seemed like some random non-sequiter, too. "Yeah, I know Zack. We were on the same newbie shuttle and everything. Gave me a fire Materia the other day..." Here was hopefully where Elena explained why he was relevant so Karla could go back to asking about the disaster.

Elena hugged her knees and wondered if she would ever learn to ask reasonable questions first and run her stupid mouth second.

"First of all," she said, trying to assess how much to reveal, "Zack's from my world, but he's from several years in the past. It's not even that many, but they're hugely eventful years. Someone goes crazy and tries to end the world, and he got really fucking close to succeeding. You have to promise me that absolutely none of this will get back to Zack. He's going to be pivotal in ways I seriously can't tell you about, and him knowing what's going to happen ... that could fuck up everything. Even little details that you might think won't matter -- they could. Okay?"

Edited 2009-11-16 08:44 (UTC)

Funny how quickly things changed. Six months ago, Karla wouldn't even have begun to parse Elena's request. Now, timelines were barely something to blink at. "If Zack knows anything about what happens, it could change the world?" she asked, just to clarify. "Maybe even enough so that whoever tried to end the world manages to pull it off?"

She didn't really need Elena's confirmation. The knowledge that one misspoken word from her could end an entire planet's existence was enough. "I swear to you by my Jewels and on the Darkness that Zack won't hear a word of this from me."

"It's ... complicated," Elena said, giving the other girl a wistful sort of smile. "But Zack has a hand in making sure it all goes right, and him knowing ahead of time could change some of the details. I probably sound ridiculous, to you, and I know I'm being paranoid, but ... I watched it almost happen. We really thought it was the end. I know how close it was. I don't know how different things would have to be, for it to be a near-miss this time around, but ... I don't want to know."

She was fussing with her hair, now, and feeling strangely self-conscious. "And ... thank you. I also ... I'd rather you not tell anyone, about my job? That's not as important, though. That's more, I know some people who would have a problem with it, and would feel the need to lecture me, and that might be annoying. It's not ... really the same thing as ... with Zack."

"I don't think you're paranoid," Karla said softly, looking out into the ocean. "You lived through somehting that was nearly the end of the world. You've seen your people beaten and broken and realized that, even so, it could have been so much worse. You aren't willing to gamble with their lives. You don't want a few misspoken words to take away what little they have left. That's not ridiculous, Elena."

She settled back, reaching out to snag her wine. "And I won't say anything about your job, either. It's hard for people who haven't been in certain situations to understand what it's like for others who have been there. So they judge. Or try to bring you around to their way of thinking. And they even mean well, but they don't understand that where they're arguing from doesn't even exist in your world anymore." She drained her wine. "I get it."

"It's selfish, too," Elena admitted. "If the world ends, then I'll end along with it, and I'd rather not have that happen."

She considered her wine glass for a long moment. "I know they mean well," she said. "But I think there's a certain ... idealism? Naivete? Or maybe I'm the one who has it all wrong, and they'd be the same even if they had seen the darker side of things. It's messy, I guess."

A long sip of her wine, and then, "There was ... a meteor. About the size of a city. Someone used dark magic to call it down. Someone else stopped it, but it was just over Midgar when they did. Close enough to smash what was left of the city."

"Hell's fire, Mother Night, and may the Darkness be merciful," Karla breathed, drinking down the last of her wine in an effort to not picture that much devestation. She was pouring more for herself and for Elena before she'd finished swallowing.

"And now people are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives, rebuild their homes, eke out a living..." she paused as she remembered something Elena had said earlier. "What do you mean, the land is so polluted it won't grow food?" she asked. "I mean--you aren't exaggerating when you say that, right?"

"Not even slightly," Elena said, shaking her head slowly. "Before Midgar fell, we were polluting like crazy. Destroying the planet's life, although we didn't realize it."

Well, they had been warned. But in ShinRa's defense, it was hard to take crazed ecoterrorists seriously.

"That was bad enough. But the city of Midgar itself .... There were reactors. Enormous power plants. Those came crashing down, so the ruins are radioactive. Nothing grows. Reno's managed some small plants, beans and such, just in his apartment. He gives them away to some of the starving neighborhood kids."

Karla was halfway through making the offer before her brain actually registered what she was saying. "I can fix that, you know."

Not that conscious thought would have prevented her from offering, but she might have tried to phrase it a bit better. Sound less crazy. "It's part of being a Queen. I Heal the land."

Elena was staring at the other blonde now, unsure if this was a joke she wasn't getting, or ...

"You ... heal land?" she said. "How does ... that even work?"

Was being a Queen like being an Ancient?

Karla shrugged. "With Craft, like everything else, I guess," she said wryly. "It's an inborn trait, one of the things that makes a Queen a Queen. I can feel the land, feel when things are wrong with it. It...communicated with me and lets me know how to fix it. Not with words," she added hastily, trying to convince Elena that she wasn't crazy. "Something more...basic than that. Feelings. It's--hard to explain. But I can do it. Back home, Queens are called 'the land's heart.'"

"Is this ... one of those things where you absorb the sickness?" Elena asked, uncertainly.

Because ... there was sort of a lot of it, around Edge, was all, and she didn't want Karla to poison herself and/or explode.

Karla laughed a bit and shook her head. "That's Raven's thing, not mine," she said. "Ummm..."

It was hard to explain when she didn't just have something to demonstrate on. "All I basically do is speed up what naturally happens and make it stronger and better. Push aside what is wrong and strengthen what is right. Does...that make sense at all?"

Elena nodded, surprised to find that it did make sense.

"I think I get it," she said. "I mean, I'm assuming the land isn't dead for good. Most things grow again. So ... speeding that up, that would be ..."

She shook her head. Actual, usable land, near Edge? That would be damn close to a miracle.

"It would be tiring, sure," Karla continued, encouraged by Elena's understanding, "since I'd be using my energy and Craft to set it all right, but it wouldn't even be all that bad, since my Sapphire would be doing most of the work."

And here, Karla suffered from a lack of imagination. Never having seen land as polluted as Midgar's (and having no grasp of the term 'radioactive'), she was making assumptions about her task that really had no bais in reality.

She turned towards Elena and smiled a bit. "Lots of hard work, most definitely, but it wouldn't be impossible. I mean, this was the kind of thing I was born to do."

Elena hesitated. She opened her mouth, then closed it again, and ... now was a good time for a long drink of her wine.

"I ... really hope this isn't putting you on the spot," Elena said, carefully, "but I can't ... quite ... tell if you're making conversation or if you're ... offering to ... actually ..."

Actually come and try to fix some of what was horribly, painfully wrong with Edge? Because that would be huge. She didn't want to put the other girl in a difficult position, but she couldn't possibly just politely let that go, if she was offering.

Edge needed the help too badly.

"Of course I'm offering," Karla said, sounding genuinely puzzled. "Your people need help--the kind of help I was born to give. Who wouldn't help under circumstances like that?"

Elena was not going to hug the other girl. She wasn't. She was doing entirely too much hugging, lately, and that had to stop.

She was, however, going to stare into the sand for a few seconds before looking back at her.

"Thank you," she said. "I ... don't know what else to say. 'Thank you' doesn't quite cover it. We ... we need all the help we can get."

Which Karla could probably imagine, from the offhand references to starving neighborhood kids. Edge was filled with orphans. At least none of them were dying of Geostigma any longer.

The Geostigma would probably cause Karla's brain to explode if she ever heard of it, but that was neither here nor there.

"I'm not doing it for completely unselfish reasons, either," Karla said, filling the silence. "I can't deny my hope that helping your people will make me feel better about abandoning my own." She drained her glass, trying not to sound as bitter as she felt. "I mean, I'd help them regardless--" 'children in need' being a very potent motivator for Karla right now, "but still--I have my own reasons beyond a desire to help."

The Beach, Friday Afternoon

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