Description: Aranha makes a visit to the YFCC to visit a particular chi sage to discuss what had happened during their fight at the Abandoned Temple and what was going on at Stonehenge. Both men come out of it with something to think about.
The YFCC. Since it was created, the Center has -- in spite of numerous accidental or not-so-accidental attempts to level it to the ground, literally -- perservered and grown into quite an institution. Many years ago it was a handful of people, struggling to keep up with the founders' vision. Now it in many ways practically runs itself. A year or two ago, it would have been unthinkable that a given volunteer at the center would even know how to throw a punch. Now there's a handful of people on staff who've actually mastered chi techniques. In short, it's not a place that needs the constant, watchful guiding hand of the people in more senior positions anymore. Having broken the shell, the chick now spreads its wings and prepares to fly.
Still, in the end, some people... well, they're mother hens when you get right down to it. And just because a baby bird is leaving the nest doesn't mean the parents are going to ignore it.
This is probably why instead of leaving his conversation with Kula on the Sky Noah and heading *immediately* for France to track Ash Crimson down, Frei instead goes back to Southtown and stops in at the Center to make sure everything's running smoothly.
Interestingly enough, he walked in the door with his bag all packed and his hair messed up from running and out of breath, expecting to have to do the same thing he does EVERY time there's a major tournament or massive event: leave notes, remind people of things, let them know when he'll be back, provide contact information. Instead he got as far as the front desk when one of the coordinators, a bright young woman named Ritsuko, put out a hand to stop him.
"We've got your cell number," she said evenly, fighting down a smile, "and payroll is already done this month. I got Miki to cover your class until you get back so the students won't miss anything. And if anyone tries to break down the door we'll get the students inside and wait for help."
There was a long pause while the out-of-breath redhead just stared at the young woman who so primly pre-empted him entirely, then said "Oh thank you God," before collapsing into a chair, dropping his bags on the floor. Sometimes, a little break never hurt anyone.
And just as the red headed chi sage crashes into the chair, the door opens once more. In walks the Dancing Spider. In contrast to Frei, Aranha seems unrushed and not particularly fatigued though that might be from the fact that both capoeira and parkour are stamina intensive activities.
The capoeirista nods towards Ritsuko who may or may not remember him. It has been a long time since he had last visited the center. He then waves to monk with an amused look on his face that seems as though it's about to give way to laughter any minute.
"Man... Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. Frei, you're just the person I wanted to see." After he says that he quickly moves towards the red-headed monk with hand extended to him in preparation for a handshake.
Fortune does favor the bold, or so it's said. Slumped in that chair, Frei does look tired and... well, 'boneless' is probably the best word, limbs akimbo, his stance saying that he really *needs* to just be sitting there and resting for a moment. However, the sound of someone approaching and saying his name makes him pay attention again, a hand coming up to brush his bangs out of his eyes as Frei looks to see who it is. The result is surprising; he'd expected -- after the teams were publically announced -- that this particular individual would be off doing the tournament thing... and, more importantly, recovering from the minorly traumatic event they both shared.
For a moment, just seeing Aranha drags Frei mentally back to the temple in Sunshine City, and the presence that all three fighters -- including the aging assassin, Gen -- felt there. The partial impetus for this trek he's about to embark on, though not all of it. At least Aranha seems to be in good shape.
He forces himself to sit up, shrugging off fatigue, and he does give a genuine smile as the capoeirista walks across the room to shake his hand. "Maybe, but you can control being good... not so much, being lucky," he says, as Ritsuko nods and smiles at Aranha, giving him a little wave before tottering off to give the two fighters some privacy... or as much as you can get in a public space like this. "You look good... is your King of Fighters battle already over? I'm sitting out this first round, looks like."
"Yeah. To be honest though I think the ideal situation is to be /both./" The capoeirista shrugs before moving to a desk and leaning on it. "Our team fight has already been taken care of. They underestimated us, and they paid for it." Though it goes unverbalized he adds, 'Especially their last guy, Carmine.' "Either way, I'm of the belief that one should earn their right to talk shit if they are going to do so."
He takes a moment to stretch before returning to that leaning position he was previously in. "As for what I'm doing here, I had a bit of time waiting for the rounds' matches to finish up and so I figured I'd check out some things in Sunshine City, but I wanted to speak with you first." I doesn't specify what but considering what had happened, and the fact that it was Frei that he came to visit, it should be obvious what he wants to talk about.
He doesn't bother to hide a little bit of a grimace; in Frei's heart of hearts, as soon as he saw Aranha walk in the door, he knew that the Dancing Spider would undoubtedly be here to ask questions about what happened in Sunshine City. If the sage were in Aranha's place, he'd be doing pretty much the same, after all... Still, it's distressing. Whatever that dark feeling was, it thoroughly spooked Frei. More to the point, it was one more element of anxiety in a mind already churning with issues and concerns. Taizhou's aftermath made it clear that his skills weren't up to the task of the burden he's decided to take on, not yet... and now that constant, nagging feeling that something terrible is about to happen is driving him onward in a way he'd rather not think about too hard. And then there's everything Kula Diamond shared with him...
Frei leans forward, putting his chin in his hands and resting his elbows on his knees, affecting a pose of concentration and thought. "I don't blame you. It's a mystery to me, too, but we all felt... something. I can't describe it to you. It was... hungry," he says at last, verbalizing it for the first time as he looks up to Aranha, trying to get a read on his reaction. "Something waiting in the dark. And... well." Gen... the assassin. The man who had stumbled on Frei and Rust in the dark, with his own philosophical and quirky views. Telling Frei to shut it out, not let it control him, overwhelm him.
But how could he NOT be influenced by it?
"I don't think I handled it very well," is what he says, at last.
Aranha is a man of the belief that he wouldn't be nearly as good of fighter, or poker player he is without his ability to read people even if it's through more mundane means than psionic empathy or chi, or through some type of psychology education. The look on Frei's face is telling and quite possibly, it yields more information than the monk's words.
Aranha's own facial response takes on a more quietly thoughtful expression, as he weighs both Frei's facial and verbal responses before he comes in with his own. "Well, I can say with absolute certainty you had sensed more than I did. All I got was this nagging sensation that something wasn't right. I couldn't exactly put my finger on what it was. At least not until you and Gen started speaking."
He closes his eyes. "I ended up getting that same sense of something being not quite some time later and I'm not exactly sure if it was me sensing two related things or if I was sensing two completely unrelated things that just happened to feel not right."
Although his head is still in his hands, Frei does 'nod' a bit at that; it's more an oblique motion of the head up and down a bit than it is a full-on nod. Still, the meaning of it should be relatively clear. "Well, it's no surprise. I think even the fighter in the world with the least amount of training or skill in using their chi at all would have felt something... probably just a nagging thing. Since you're more attuned, naturally you felt like something was 'wrong'." These two have battled more than a few times, either as partners or as opponents, and Frei has a relatively good sense of Aranha's facility with chi. It might not be his bread and butter, like it is for some fighters, but it's clear that the Dancing Spider has attained that state of 'wholeness' that most fighters do at some point, even those who don't specialize in chi energy.
With a sigh, Frei shakes his head. "Sadly, other than that I don't know much." This is, strictly speaking, not entirely true. He has leads... oh boy, does he. But inside, the young sage is waging an internal war of ethics over what he should share with his guest. Some of it is... personal. Very personal. Some of it is just speculation. And perhaps most importantly -- if Kula is to be believed -- some of it is so dangerous that it might just get Aranha killed. Frei has no doubts the capoeira fighter can take care of himself, but...
"For weeks and weeks I've had this sense of... foreboding," he says, echoing words he said to Zach Glen not so long ago, looking up at the YFCC ceiling as he speaks. "I don't claim to be able to read the future or anything, but... ever since Sunshine City, I've felt uneasy. It's... something in the wind, I guess." Sitting back, he shrugs before looking back to Aranha. "I have... a few leads. Things I want to look into that might be related..." There's a 'but...' here, and though he doesn't verbalize it, Frei sort of doesn't have to.
Aranha takes a moment to consider his words. How much does he share with Frei? Does he wait for him to give information in exchange for a possible lead that Frei could investigate? Does he wait until Naerose investigates the temple fully?
Eventually, Aranha decides on talking about Stonehenge though he intends to leave Naerose's name out of it. He's pretty sure she has a reputation as a bit of a crack pot. "An associate of mine wanted to go to Stonehenge because she was convinced there was something about to go down there."
He looks downward as he continues the tale not because of shame but rather because he's still taking time to organize his thoughts. "There were other people there and blows were exchanged. Near the end of the fight one of the people started acting weird which was about the point where I started getting that nagging feeling of something not being right again. Later my associate told me that Stonehenge was a type of node, a gathering place for energy and that person we were fighting was drawing power from that location and that my associate had no idea how they were doing it. But what my associate had said made me wonder if the Temple was some kind of node as well."
Blinking in surprise, Frei tilts his head at Aranha's description of what he was told. He does seem undisguisedly startled by this news; whoever this 'associate' is, he or she seems to have a grip on things pretty well in hand, by the young sage's estimation. "Well..." Frei starts, gathering his thoughts. Getting out of the chair, he stretches both arms over his head, fingers locked together, before bringing them back down. One hand comes back up, to his chin, in a gesture of contemplation, before he turns to Aranha. "That's not an implausible theory. Have you ever heard of 'ley lines' before?"
Turning back to the reception desk, Frei reaches over and grabs a pad of note paper and a pencil. Quickly, he scribbles a blobbish-looking map on it that, from a certain angle, represents Japan, Australia, and eastern Asia... sort of. "They were an old British archeologist's theory, I think," he adds, before taking the pencil and drawing a few dots on it, then connecting them all with lines, like a grid, and turning the paper around so Aranha can see it. "Most people think it's superstition, but leylines are thought to be conduits of power beneath the Earth. According to the guy who cooked up the idea, ancient people unconsciously built important sacred sites -- like Stonehenge -- along those lines of power." He shrugs a bit, then glances down at his (let's face it: not terribly good or legible map), before looking back at Aranha. "Most people think it's sort of nonsense, but there might be some truth to it. After all, chi energy is life energy. It's not so hard to believe there might be leylines of chi flow beneath the surface of the planet, and those 'nodes' your friend mentioned happen when a lot of lines cross..."
Shaking his head, Frei gives a helpless little smile. "Hwa... yet another thing to think about. To be honest with you," he says, glancing sidelong at Aranha, "ever since Taizhou, that's been on my mind. I want to find some sort of technique for 'suppressing' chi. I mean, if there really is some sort of... ley node under Sunshine City with a dark presence in it, you'd want to close off that node as soon as possible..."
Aranha nods in the affirmative to the question of whether or not he has heard of ley lines however he finds the need to clarify. "Before my associate had mentioned it, I had heard of it but dismissed it as fiction, however, recent events have forced me to reconsider my position."
A moment is taken to look at Frei's improvised map. "My associate mentioned that there were temporary nodes that just as easily could disappear. Which also means what we experienced at the temple may not be there when we explore it again."
The fact that Frei mentions Taizhou makes his mind go off in a tangent that he thinks might give the two men another thing to think about. "You mentioning Taizhou made me think of something. I wonder if those two Jinchuu tournaments ended up creating some type of temporary node. In each case, the tournament gathered a large number of fighters in a centralized location, and strange things with energy happened surrounding it. But what you propose as far as suppressing chi would seem to have its benefits both on a grand scale, like you mentioned, or on a smaller scale suppressing it within an area around yourself as sort of a protection from that presence that seemed to give you a hard time back there."
The redhead looks off into the distance at that question, giving it some thought. "I wasn't around for the first Jinchuu tournament, so I can't say... but I feel like it'd be hard to create a 'temporary' node." He turns back to Aranha, then holds out his arm, rolling up his sleeve so that, just barely visible under the skin, are the tracings of veins and arteries. "This is just theory, alright? But it seems like if you wanted to make an 'artificial' node, you'd have to somehow weave it into the leylines that already exist, or alter their flow... or probably both." He pauses, thinking of the Katsuten bomb, sitting like some sort of terrible, demonic egg in the bottom of Nenzhao... and the terrible, lurching lava flows and breaks in the Earth's crust that were the result. Sighing, he shakes his head and shrugs. "Of course, you can never tell with Seishirou Ryouhara. Maybe he found a way to do it."
Yet another reason that Frei might have to simply... endure a situation he doesn't quite find to his liking at the moment.
However, Aranha's other idea does intrigue him. After all, Frei proved its viability entirely by accident during the actual fight with Gen in the first place. Glancing down at the palm of his open hand, he 'hmmms' in the back of his throat. "When we were fighting Gen... I was able to shut that feeling out for a moment." Shinra Banshou... a technique drawing on the wu xing cycle that Frei learned by making a 'pact' with 'ancient spirits.' In the end those 'spirits' were just fragments of his own psyche, given voice as his ability to sense chi slowly returned to him. But still... "I don't really know how, other than that I was desperate, and it took everything I had, and it didn't last long. But it IS possible."
The capoeirista strokes his chin as Frei describes what happened while he was out cold due to the injuries from Gen's attacks. While he saw what happened during broadcasts, it's another thing to get things straight from the source. Especially when there are some things that a camera can't exactly pick up.
'And just as fleeting as the abilities I have when drawing upon inspiration,' the capoeirista muses to himself. "I think we've given each other a lot to think about. But either way my associate wanted to see the temple for themselves. I recommended that they don't go alone just in case it has a similar effect on them as it did on you. But you may end up finding them giving you a visit as well."
Sadly for Aranha, Frei has a scholar's mind at heart. Give him new experimental toys to tinker with, or new ideas to ponder, and they begin to dominate his thinking to a point where niceties of conversation and being a decent polite human being start to fade to afterthoughts. This is why at first, when the Dancing Spider mentions what's to come, the redhead gives a noncommital 'mmhmm' noise, his eyes fixed on something in the distance... probably some image in his head only Frei can see or describe.
Eventually, however, he seems to process what got said... as if it still got heard, but just took longer to get to his brain than everything else on his mind. Turning to the capoeirista, Frei sheepishly rubs the back of his head, smiling tiredly. "Sorry about that. Just... hmmm. Anyhow, thank you for coming to see me, you've given me a lot to think about. I wouldn't go alone to that temple, either. I'd avoid it altogether if that were possible, but *somebody's* got to look into it. Maybe your friend will figure something out that I didn't."
Frowning, Frei seems to consider something, then discard it, reaching down and grabbing his bag. Shouldering it, he turns back to Aranha to say one last farewell. "I think I had better step up my timeta... oh! I didn't even think to say, congratulations on your win! Maybe we'll see each other in the next round and can compare notes, or something. And..." Here, he grimaces a little bit. Kula's warning... if these are connected, it's irresponsible not to say *something*. "Be careful. I've heard that there are some violent groups out there interested in this same stuff. That woman you met... she might even have been one of them." The NESTS cartel... it wouldn't shock him to know they were after leylines, if they're cloning the Kusanagi bloodline.
Log created on 15:25:32 02/23/2011 by Aranha, and last modified on 08:16:46 02/24/2011.