exsilium | Fifth Blood

[Unusually for this network user, the transmission is purely Audio. A great deal of transports will of course recognize the voice as belonging to Kanaya Maryam. Strangers will hear a fifteen-year-old female, naturally rather mature and composed, doing her best to sound even more so. She speaks crisply and briskly with no mercy, like the distinctions between American and British English are to be stalked into a dark alley and shot in the back of the skull.]

The armageddon that occurred in the world of Elmer C. Albatross isn't the only one that's ever occurred in paradox space, you know. Just ask Asuka Langley Soryu or Rei Ayanami or Shinji Ikari. Any of them can tell you that the end of a world is always at least as ugly a thing as what happened on May Twenty-First. Anyone who escaped the planet Alternia before the meteors struck can reiterate the sentiments that Exsilium is a far better alternative to no planet at all. For many of us, Exsilium is our home now and we'll fight literally to the ends of an Earth for its sake.

I know not all of you feel that sort of debt to the Initiative. You do want to go home, this isn't your war, it's their fault. That's really too bad. Because if we let the United Earth have their way and don't develop Initiative in both senses of the word, we're all going to be post-apocalyptic refugees before long. We come from dozens of worlds. Would you like to take arms with the Initiative to fight against the reckoning, or watch each one meet the same fate Elmer's world did?

[An open question, Exsilium.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

No.

[That's all he'll say on the matter.]

But... you're colleagues with Asuka... [She doesn't understand.] Did you get conscripted before her?

That's right.

... I don't want to be bothered by people who think I have an opinion I don't have. It's nothing but trouble. [In other words: don't use me as an example.

It's true that he has nowhere to go. But he wouldn't call Exsilium home, and he doesn't think he's truly willing to die for its sake.]

Oh? [Her tone shifts - negative, icy.] In that case where were you on the twenty-first?

[He senses that hostility. Back down, says every inch of him. His response is soft and carefully void of emotion, as if reporting to a superior officer.]

I was running supplies in the Hold.

[Well, at least he tried. She relents somewhat, a glacier instead of an iceberg.]

But you're not a rebel, are you, Shinji.

... why do I have to take sides? Why do you have to assume-- [He suddenly cuts off, the irritation that had been in him swelling into something suddenly angry and insulted. He continues, frustrated.] If I agree, then I'm fighting for the Initiative, if I don't... I'm a rebel? I don't want to pick a side. I don't want a... a stranger deciding who I'm fighting for for me.

[A beat.] Leave me alone. You shouldn't drag people into things they don't want to be dragged into.

Edited (I CAN WORD THINGS BETTER) 2013-05-26 02:30 (UTC)

Hey, Ikari does what he has to do!

Edited (EXCLAMATION POINT!!!!) 2013-05-26 02:31 (UTC)