Starry Dreamscapes {open}

[Kokoro]

January 15, 2025, 10:28 p.m.

Her silhouettte stood out against the barren ground, small spots of snow emphasized against her small, dark shape. The snow seemed rebellious in a sense, refusing to go away even though all the rest was gone. She felt vaguely like a snowflake, when looking out here. {"I know how you feel, little snowflakes,"} she thought to herself, feeling oddly out of self as she thought it, {"I know what it's like to keep going, even after all hope is gone..."} She knew the snow's destiny, though, and, despite that, she wanted to save some, to keep it safe.

Maybe that's what the yellow one who called himself her dad had thought. {"Bumblebee. His name is Bumblebee. Not Brandon. Not yellow. And my name is Kokoro. Not lab rat. Not Snowy. I am one of a kind. I am a living being, too..."} She had to keep reminding herself of that. She felt like she was going insane, losing grip on reality, falling into the deep abyss that she knew she would never be able to return from.

They had given her new clothing, stuff that would shield her from the cold. It was still January, but the occasional burst of slight warmth brought a lot of cheer toward the dwindling supply of snow. They weren't alive, but she felt like they were dying billions of tiny snowflake deaths.

Her boots felt uncomfortable on her feet, and as the looked down at them, a chilly night breeze blew a wisp of black hair into her expressive gray eyes. She was cold. Maybe she should go inside. So she could dream up her next 'reality'... But it was peaceful out here. She'd hate to find out that it wasn't real, hate to wake up into a less peaceful world...

With a sigh, she looked up at the starry sky...

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[Jade Bolton]

Jade was out late. She was a restless individual today, and had spent all day doing a variety of things in the base, mostly school and art related. She HAD to get out, because staying cooped up inside would make her go nuts! She liked hanging around the base outside at night, because the weather was cool and it was easy on her rather abnormally sensitive dark eyes. She was wandering along for now, only having been out for a bit, and was coincidentally moving Koko's direction. Jade was out to practice her abilities as well, because it never went over well trying to work on them indoors.

She was alert as she moved about.

The quaking and shifting of sand could be heard farther off behind Kokoro as Jade manipulated the thick sand and earth beneath and before her. The earth rose up in tall columns about a foot around her stance, and each time they rose up, she jumped from one to the next before the sunk down rapidly behind her. Normally she would walk on solid ground, but she liked to challenge herself, and it had been a while since she had worked with her ability. When she sensed Kokoro's scent up ahead by about half a meter, the column she landed on dropped down about half its height before freezing in place. Jade eyed the fellow organic curiously. She was pretty sure that the energy she sensed was coming from a techno organic. And here she thought she and Danny were among the few.

The colomn dropped completely after she verified she saw another being up ahead. "Hello?" she called, walking normally towards her after the earth settled beneath and around her.

[Kokoro]

Unlike Jade, Koko had not been paying that much attention. She also was not at all practiced with her ability. She only barely learned she had it, after all, and it kind of freaked her out a bit. But now, now she jumped. She'd gotten pretty close... Relatively, at least. Particularly for being friendly. She wasn't used to friendly people. She got confused, sometimes. After a very mild bout of panic, as her systems increased rapidly for a fraction of a second, she shook her head, her messy black hair framing - and attacking - her face.

Friendly person this was. Koko reminded herself to be nice. The scars on her face were healing nicely, as a side note. Normally they'd break open at about this point as her eyes widened momentarily in shock. They'd been really touchy about that for the longest time. She looked toward Jade, a few meters a way, tilting her head slightly to the side, a dog-like expression of curiosity.

"H-... Hello..." Yet another side note: This girl had been moving earth. MOVING it. Like, not picking it up, but... Shifting it. Mentally. No hands. This was... Strange. Koko doggedly watched Jade as she approached.

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[Jade Bolton]

"Hey, I'm Jade...who are you? I know what you are, but I don't think I've seen you around here before." Jade greeted, stopping after a couple paces to keep a respectful distance so as to not alarm her. As the moonlight peeked through the partly-cloudy sky, Jade's rather keen night vision could pick up details such as a few of the healing scars on Kokoro's face at slightly greater detail than the normal eye.

This one seemed shy. Well she could relate to the shyness, so she could work with that. Obviously the girl must be living around here already...right? She wanted to know more. Jade was pretty awkward with long term, close friendships...she was shy as well and she didn't get out much.

[Kokoro]

For a hesitant little while, she choked on the answer, not quite sure how to say it. "He... He called me Kokoro. If that's what you meant, of course. I mean... Of course that's what you meant, what else..." She shook her head sharply, ending that thought quickly. She was still knew to this communication thing. The most communication she'd grown up with was more along the lines of... Well, orders. So... Friendly conversation was still pretty... Non-existant in her mind. Even after Bumblebee had found her.

"Were you just... Moving the ground?" She asked with a hint of incredulity in her voice, as it finally caught up with her. The ground had moved under Jade's feet. How often did that happen?

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[Jade Bolton]

Jade nodded, a thoughtful look on her face regarding Kokoro's first response.

"Yes I was. It's my personal ability. Kokoro, that means "darkness" in Japanese. Nice." she replied with a smile. "He as in your creator, I presume." based on how she spoke initially, it was an uncomfortable subject. Jade knew all the TO's had unique lives to tell, but some weren't always fun to share. Jade was proud to be raised by Perceptor. She knew others weren't so lucky. Thus Jade wouldn't press Koko to say much, only if she wanted to. "But yeah, I recently discovered I can manipulate earth/minerals."

Jade rose up a hand and extended it from her side, making it almost parallel to the ground. With no aid from wind, two ropes of sandy earth rose up from the ground and curled around her hand lightly in opposite directions. The ropes then twisted clockwise briefly and formed a ball about the diameter of her hand, and the rest of the sand dropped to the ground. "Been practicing with it a lot. What about you? Have you discovered yours yet?"

[Kokoro]

Koko listened attentively, her attention caught in the movement of the dusty dirt as it formed in her hand with seemingly very little effort on her part. It was strange - surreal, in a sense. The world was so much stranger than the scientists who'd kept her had made it seem - giants robots, half-alien children with super powers, weird people in super suits, highly advanced artificial intelligence programs... She felt like she was living in the science fiction book. It was this surrealism that made it hard for her to tell whether or not she was dreaming. For all she knew, the scientists could have been trying out a new hallucinogenic in the gas chamber while she was asleep to see how she'd react... This one was much more potent than the last one if they were. Much more subtle. She wanted to believe that, but at the same time, she really, really did not want to be back in that lab. This was heaven compared to that - even if it was a confusing heaven.

This time her answer was more ready, less hesitant as the idea of conversation suddenly struck her. "My ability? Um... Yeah, I guess. It's not as flashy, and I can barely manage it, but... I can accelerate my mind. Well, less "I can" and more "it happens", but..." She cut herself off, shaking her head very faintly. Her voice expressed more emotion and feeling than any body language of facial expression, because she'd been trained for just over twelve years that body language was a bad thing, and any facial expressions were just as bad, if not worse. Besides, it hurt the scars, even if they were healing fairly quickly. It was still sore to touch, her face was, and motion didn't exactly help that much. "And yeah... I meant my creator, in the way you use the term."

The way she'd always said creator, before leaving the lab, was as the person who'd literally sat there and combined the DNA together and created the child, not her technical father, so at first it had confused her - but she was starting to understand such things a bit better, so things were clicking. Gradually.

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[Jade Bolton]

"I see. Mine varies...still haven't figured out all of what I can do with it. It just depends on how creative you get. I'm sure that's the same way with yours too." Jade replied, the ball of earth then dissipated rapidly as if it had been crushed by a firm grip. A thin wave of sand formed around her feet and fluxed upward towards her knees, then died down again before she tilted her head curiously. "So how new are you? I thought my friend Danielle was the only Techno Organic here. They don't tell us a whole lot."

[Kokoro]

Koko had to pause for a moment. Today was about two weeks into January, and she'd gotten here about two weeks before New Years Day, the day she'd decided was her birthday from here on out... "I got to the base about a month ago, but... I've spent most of that time staying away from company. I... Generally don't like being around people." She watched intently as the earth crumbled, as it waved, entranced by the movement of something she normally considered very, very stable. Of course, she had once considered life to be a set of constants in a world of flowing change, a set of constants that everything flowed around like water... And yet, it often felt as though those constants were moving too.

She glanced at Jade for a moment, hesitantly speaking. "... I haven't met Danielle yet. Is she nice?" Her head tilted ever so faintly, like a curious dog, but lesser, just a faint twitch to ripple the air around her. The air was always there. She could appreciate that.

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[Jade Bolton]

"Yeah! Well she's one of the few I actually know, but it still counts for something I guess. I avoid people sometimes too." Jade replied with a slight frown. "I try to be social, but it doesn't always work. I have a tendency to be sort of quiet." Jade couldn't see herself being any other way. She was always a little quiet, polite, and low profile because of her Dad's influence. Jade didn't like to draw attention and usually unless she was out doing martial arts training, she was spending time in his lab, sometimes messing around with Danielle and whatever projects they were working on. "Maybe you can meet her sometime."

((sorry this is kind of crappy, I almost forgot about this thread. >.<))

[Kokoro]

(('tis fine.))

Kokoro quirked her mouth to the side slightly, her eyes casting down to the side, the chilly air nipping at her cheeks. "Well... The people here are the only truly nice people I've ever met. Except for Peaches, but..." She didn't go too far into that thought, shaking her head slightly even as phantom pains wracked her body from the memory. It was only the very faintest of shudders, though, that indicated this. Ghost pains only went so far when she'd suffered the real thing, a hundred times worse, almost every day of her life.

"I would like to meet her sometime." It was a fairly decisive statement, actually; she very rarely made such decisive statements when Bumblebee wasn't around, and was generally very, very timid and quiet. In fact, it wouldn't surprise her if she stayed on base for over a year and people still didn't know her. She wouldn't mind that, really. She wasn't a people person. Part of her mind still associated people - particularly humans, or human looking ones - with pain and suffering. It was trained, and it was her. There wasn't much of a way to train that out of her quickly.

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[Jade Bolton]

"Glad to hear it, I could call her for you sometime, back at the base." it seemed to Jade that this girl had a rather mysterious, potentially dismal past, if she wasn't too interested in people like she was. "Peaches? Who is that? That's a weird name for a person. Sorry...just a little curious is all." she scratched the back of her neck awkwardly, trying to see how long she could keep this girl talking. Kokoro was certainly as shy as Jade if not even shyer, and that had Jade wondering why, because unless they were mean to her, Jade generally found reasons to care about the people she became familar with.

[SeekerWing]

THREAD CLOSED

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