and I need someone to talk to apart from you

[animusnpcs]

Characters: Zo, open
Setting: floor 001
Format: brackets, party-style
Summary: Zo visits the residential levels of the Tower.
Warnings: none so far

[The elevator dings as its doors slide open--that's not an unusual occurrence, really, for a floor that not only houses one of the elevator stopping points but also the most reliable food sources. What's unusual, though, is the boy who steps out of it.

Zo enters the cafeteria, looking around as if he hasn't seen it in some time, which is true. He's followed by one retrieval unit. While she looks as blank as any retrieval unit, her collar is chipped and she wears glasses. In fact, she might be a bit familiar to some, though she will not respond (but there's something... Unusually alive about her, even so).

Though he's careful not to stray far from his bodyguard, he smiles at the floor in general.]

Um... Hi! Wow, it's been a while since I've been up here!

Comments

[animusnpcs]

No, when he crashed the elevator right after the glamour systems failed. He walked out the door but it almost killed him for real, and you--um, people like you--you're all so hard to hold on to, I was really scared I might not be able to pull him back fast enough.

[silencetoreason]

[Wait

WHAT]

Are you- Are you serious?!

[This is news to him. Even if he's never been particularly fond of the pigdog, he doesn't want him to die. Dying for real is such an infinitely foreign notion, something he's never been all that concerned about before (the year 1000 notwithstanding). And in this place, where death seems to be treated so flippantly, it's even more mind-blowing.]

You must be kidding! He never told me this! Are you certain it was him?

[animusnpcs]

I had to save him myself, so I definitely know. Nation people souls are one of the really hard ones to handle, too, so I wouldn't mix them up.

[silencetoreason]

How did he manage this? You said he crashed the elevator? What door did he go out of?

[Whoops don't mind him, he has a lot of questions all of a sudden. Goddamn your dumb almost perma-death, England, now France is even more confused than he was before!!]

[animusnpcs]

I don't know how he broke it. Ruana fixed it so it wouldn't happen again, but he just broke one of the regular elevators and it fell all the way to the bottom. Then he tried to walk out the front door to go outside of the Tower.

[silencetoreason]

Well, what nearly killed him? [He gulps.] And you saved him?

[He sounds a little more grateful about that than he'd like to let on.]

[animusnpcs]

I don't know what it was, but--um, this is hard to explain. You know how you guys are connected to all of the people in your countries? But you're here without them, right?

[silencetoreason]

Yes... I had been wondering about that, actually.

[He'd gotten a chance to see through England's glasses, but it only alleviated a bit of his confusion. He bites down on his lip to keep from interrupting. Hopefully, this kid will be able to give him some of the answers he's looking for.]

[animusnpcs]

When I take you, your souls get frozen right the way they were. But that thing--I don't know what it was--unfroze his soul, and then his soul realized that all his people weren't here and were, um, dead.

[France may have an idea of exactly how serious the death England almost experienced was now, as well as what kind of death it almost was.]

[silencetoreason]

[France is silent for a long time. The look of abject horror on his face is hard to mistake. What Zo just described is a gut-wrenching fate, a horrible one, one that he - literally, in this case - would not wish upon his worst enemy.

He can't even look Zo in the eye any more. He stares at a spot on the floor.]

He... went through that? England did? [He presses his fingers to his lips, and his voice comes out muffled.] He didn't tell me any of that at all...