Post-Mission Boredom

[catti]

Who: K'zeka and OPEN
Where: Gaming, Training gym, Cinema
When: Nebula 25-26
What: K'zeka has energy he needs to get rid of and a lot of time in which to get rid of it.
Warnings: Possible spoilers for Final Fantasy 14 up to the end of Shadowbringers. Spoilers will be marked if/when they come up.

[Note: I prefer bracket text, feel free to use prose and I'll match you]



Gaming

[K'zeka's starting to get used to the train a little bit. Not so much the inability to get off the train or control where it goes (or even ask it to go somewhere), but he's learning pretty quickly how everything works and where everything is. For the most part.

The gaming carriage is one of his favorite places so far--except for the DDR machine, which gives him anxiety he didn't even know was possible from a machine--and it's here that he can be found on the upper level playing either solo Lawn Jenga or something that's supposed to be Lawn Yahtzee but has pretty much just turned into K'zeka tossing pairs of giant dice around to see what numbers he gets. Join him?]


Training Gym

[If he's not messing around with games, he can be found in the training gym, going to town on a training dummy with a pair of...wooden spoons from the kitchen? Absolutely. He did bring his knives, but they're laid on the floor nearby, as he's trying not to dull them unnecessarily or cut up any of the training equipment.

When he's not spooning the dummy to death, he's practicing ninjutsu on it. Noticeably more clumsily than he would had his soul crystals made it here with him, and the effects are weaker. Case in point, a cast of Katon looks strong enough, but when the flames clear, have barely singed the dummy in front of him. Disappointing.]


Cinema

[The Voidtrain is leaps and bounds ahead of Eorzea in terms of fun technology. K'zeka discovered the cinema car very soon after his arrival and developed a fascination with the 'replayable plays'. In particular, Merry Little Voidtrain. He's been working through the series out of sheer curiosity, despite it clearly being geared towards children.

Feel free to join him, he doesn't mind company.]


Wildcard

[Do you want to run into K'zeka somewhere else? Let me know!]

Comments

[mustknow]

Ah, that's good then, there's no end to adventure. Though oftentimes we must apparently go about in disguise, I've yet to enjoy one of those missions.

[Which he sounds a touch disappointed about; apparently Xehanort does not object to adventures themselves.]

So you're a mercenary, then? Is world-travel new, or are you interplanetary? Do-- [His teeth click shut suddenly. No, badgering people with questions is not the polite thing to do.] My apologies, this isn't a game of thirty questions. My enthusiasm tends to run away with me a bit.

Warning: Spoilers for Shadowbringers here

[catti]

Mercenary...of sorts. Traveling to other worlds is a relatively new experience for me. Before I arrived here, I had just returned home from a several-moon-long visit to a version of my world mirrored across time and space.

[He says 'visit' but it was more like a very polite abduction. Details.]

No apologies necessary! So long as we stay clear from questions of personal nature. [At least for now.]

[mustknow]

[And here's another abduction! By trains!]

Hm, what people consider personal and what I do tend to vary rather wildly, it's probably best I not pry.

[Is he going to be able to hold to that??

Not even remotely, apparently, since it's less than two minutes later before another question appears.]

Though I admit ... I'm only guessing by context what your time measurements mean. 'Moon' being, I assume, how long it takes for a single lunar cycle? Sennight is ... harder, how many nights might it be?

[catti]

[He nods.]

A moon is the time it takes...well, the moon to complete its cycle. Or 32 suns, if you prefer that. A sennight is a quarter of a moon, or 8 suns.

[It might trip Xehanort up to know that what K'zeka considers a week is, in fact, 8 days long.]

[mustknow]

[When it comes to aliens it's not really a surprise, everyone uses different base numbers.

But it's pretty obvious he's working this out in his head. There's some clear equivalents, suns are days, nights don't get their own word unless it's sixteen of them, their system relies on a lunar calendar..

He ticks things off on his fingers silently, one by one.]

Compared to the clocks here, where one 'hour' is the passage of time needed to get from .. say, the twelve to the one, how many 'hours' is it to complete one sun?

[The aforementioned clocks - there's some all over the train! And nice and adjusted to the train's very strange idea of time, and altered to be rather Amaurotine in artistry.]

[catti]

[He has to consider this, if only because it takes him a few seconds to realize what an 'hour' is.]

One hour from twelve to one...that must be what you call bells. It's 24 bells to complete a sun.

[He has seen the clocks, and immediately figured Elidibus had some hand in their design. Not that that's a bad thing.]

[mustknow]

[None of these clocks have bells, but calling them that is at least immediately understandable from context. Xehanort crosses his arms over his chest, looking thoughtful.]

Twenty four bells to a sun, eight suns to a sennight, four sennights to a moon, and -- honestly I should be writing this down, Master Ansem would also be interested if only for scholarly curiosity..

[He pats down his person briefly as if expecting to find a pencil or paper there, which perhaps usually there is. This draws a frown when one does not appear.]

Kindly bear with me a moment, I'd very much like to take some notes and apparently utterly failed at the basics of keeping anything to write with. I shall return momentarily.

[And then he disappears. It's not really the disappearing that's noteworthy, people do that all the time around here, but the roiling shadow he vanishes with seems to want a themesong to go with it, it's probably so familiar. Elidibus is an excellent teacher.

It takes a solid two minutes before he reappears in a similar cloud of darkness, a small device in one hand, looking imminently pleased with himself.]

Alright! I am terribly sorry about that, usually I have something on hand. Now! Where were we? Moons, I think..

[catti]

[He's nodding along with what Xehanort is saying, pausing at the mention of a 'Master Ansem'. A researcher maybe?]

Aye, go ahead. I have no--

[The 'plans' part goes unsaid, as Xehanort disappears into an extremely familiar dark cloud that K'zeka just stares at for several seconds after it disappears. He thought Elidibus was the only Ascian on the train, but Xehanort appears to make two. The entire time he's gone, K'zeka attempts to process this information then debates whether or not he wants to go after the other guy.]

Ah...four sennights to a moon, I think.

[mustknow]

[On the dubious bright side, Xehanort seems more than willing to just return on his own, skipping the need to hunt him down.

He turns the tablet on, pulls up one of the few notepad features, and immediately begins jotting notes down. He wasn't kidding - all of this is going to be saved for later, to be shared with fellow interested souls.]

Ah, right! ...And in spite of my intending to stop with the endless questions, I'm still going on, aren't I? While it seems new species and cultures are old hat to some people, it's still quite new to me, and every time we stop on a new world it's some terrible tragedy and there's no time to find out anything like ... what they call the time of day. Or how long a year is.

[The tablet is wiggled.]

This might not seem important to you, but once I return home with it.. assuming I can, at any rate, it's going to fuel at least one or two papers. It's very interesting from an outside perspective!

[Home. Could he ever really return to Radiant Garden at this point?]

[catti]

[The scientific usefulness of this conversation is generally lost K'zeka as far as it extends to writing academic papers, unfortunately, so said hypothetical papers don't pique his interest.

Xehanort's tablet does, though, and K'zeka is doing a very good impersonation of a cat on a newspaper as he tries to peek at what Xehanort's jotting down without actually getting in the way.]

If you can, you should visit Hydaelyn yourself and I can give you a proper tour.

[mustknow]

[There's a long glance at K'zeka when he seems curious about the tablet, for a moment tempted to hide it - and then he simply shows the miqo'te what he's writing.

Hours! Days! Sennights. And apparently K'zeka himself, which is erroneously spelled 'Kazeeka', on what looks like a parchment on the other side of the screen but must surely just be a picture.]

If I don't keep notes everything just flies out of my head.

[Hydaelyn. He's heard of that before, but where had he heard it? He rakes through his memories, attempting to connnect it to something, and when he finally does the young researcher brightens up a bit.]

Oh! I'm sorry I'm used to hearing it by a different name. Apparently I'll be spending a fair bit of time there in the future, so I'll look forward to it.

['Hydaelyn' was what some people called the Source, according to Elidibus. Theoretically his true home, a place he had no memory of at all.]

Especially if you know any dragons. I've never met one, but I've heard amazing things. Have you ever met one? [...Surely so!] Are they anything like the stories?