Kurotsuchi Mayuri likes test subjects (black_soil) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2013-10-08 13:45:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, mayuri kurotsuchi, motoko kusanagi |
Who: Motoko Kusanagi, Mayuri Kurotsuchi
What: A visit to the laboratory for upgrades, fun with narration balloons. Mayuri also rats out Gin and explains what they really are, so Motoko knows what the hell she’s dealing with.
When: after this text.
Rating: Low to Medium. 'Medium' stands for 'medical' but since Motoko’s all robotical, there’s no blood involved...but there is passing mention of some experiments. Glossed over, of course.
Status: Complete!
Coming to the labs always bothered Motoko. There was a part of her that balked at what was basically being a running experiment for her cousin. But she was willing to do anything to ensure she was up to par, and she was confident she had the ability to keep control and lock anyone out.
She waited to be let in, scanning the area.
The area was a standard lab and nothing was amiss on the surface, or anything above ground level. Mayuri was also a very quick learner, and he had already shielded everything below ground, where all the really important work and his personal projects were contained, so scanning would be difficult, if not impossible.
He was definitely no dummy. Someone who showed up for a fight one hour later with duplicate organs and bones inside his body, to fool an opponent, wasn't an idiot and wasn't unprepared.
He also liked his test subjects. Dead or alive. Since Motoko was related to him, she was afforded the luxury of being left alive, and since Canaan was important to Motoko? That same luxury was extended to her. Everyone else could die in a fire, and he would be trying to see if he could extract DNA from their teeth. It wouldn't phase him, not one bit. YAY. SCIENCE!
After receiving notice that Motoko was there, he left that area of his lab and went into the waiting area, to greet her. His face was still elaborately painted, and he still looked like a kabuki nightmare gone to Egypt, but that was simply how he was. Theatrically weird.
"Motoko-chan. You look well." He said, staring at her with his golden-hued eyes, full of curiosity. "Let's go to an area where we can run those scans. Are you balloons in place, still?"
He watched and waited, to see if there would be any commentary of any sort.
Motoko, the bubble said, was observing her cousin with some curiosity. She was always interested to see what new and/or disturbing modification he’d applied to himself. She gave a long suffering sigh, and simply said, “Yes.”
"Oooooo," cooed Mayuri, fascinated by this. He walked around her in a circle, his robes and labcoat swishing faintly as he did so. He stopped in front of her and gave the balloon an experimental poke with the one incredibly long, blue fingernail he had on the middle finger of his right hand.
"Your data with these balloons will be interesting to sort through, indeed. I would also tell you what the modifications are, but then that would be giving away secrets which keep me safe in the event of a catastrophe," he explained, with a grin on his face. That grin came with enough gold-plated bling on his teeth to instantly blind a thousand hiphop artists if put under bright lighting. What might be more disconcerting, was that Mayuri's gums weren't a natural color, but were as white as his facepaint was. "It would be a waste of both of our time if I even attempted to explain it to you. Let's go to the lab I've modified for you, cousin, and see to your calibrations and eye modifications. I think you will be satisfied, and more so when Canaan has her implants put in."
He motioned with one extended arm that they should walk in a specific direction, toward a locked door.
“I was thinking more like the external things. I don’t want to know any secrets. For all I know you have a scorpion tail under your coat.” Motoko followed along, feeling a little pensive. She shut down the thought, shooting a glance at the thought bubble over her head The bubble displayed, proudly.
"Always possible, but you're more likely to find scar tissue, from upgrades to myself." He stopped when he read what was in the balloon and sneered a little, before appearing to be dismissive and waving it off with a hand.
"Tch! You're safe," he told her, so she didn't have to be so on edge. Having the balloon there was actually quite informative. Now he knew what some of his employees had just been doing. "It's everyone else and a select few of my own kind, that should be worried. One in particular, but I have been keeping an eye on him. It's of no consequence, since that is our problem, and not yours."
He entered the code and let it scan his eyes and his left hand, before the door opened. It revealed a short corridor that was well lit, with an exit at each end, and only one sliding door in between. It was a stark comparison to the dank dark of the levels, below, which were much more ominous and foreboding. From the looks of it, he had taken Canaan's skittishness into account, and set up something that was ground level and well lit, with exit signs clearly labeled.
He stopped before the door and opened it with another numerical code, to reveal a lab with the calibration station there, as well as spare parts, and several computer terminals with monitors that were easily visible, even from where Motoko's perspective.
Motoko just disliked being worked on. She'd hated it when it was Section 9's chop shop, and she hated it now, but she liked being efficient and she liked being good. She'd long ago accepted being better than a normal human in her dream world, and she accepted it here. Her ghost was human, and that's what mattered. All of this popped above her head as she walked. She took note of the lab. “I know you’ll just say you’re striving for efficiency as you wouldn’t want Canaan to be skittish while working on her, but you really are a surprisingly good man, Mayuri.”
"Beyond what I am already, the confrontation with my splintered self was a quite enlightening experience," Mayuri explained, as he took in what her bubble was saying. "If you let others know, then I won't be able to keep them intimidated and from interrupting my important work here. Conversely, both you and Canaan give me an opportunity to try out some potential advancements, which in turn is allowing us to study and come up with new advancements. It is a symbiotic relationship. You also bring in an excellent supply of human corpses, which are always useful. I have no complaints or qualms about repaying the favor, or denying such opportunities when they arise."
He waited by the platform for her, so he could stabilize her body in the frame, and get to work.
"I'd rather not be killing anyone but it's part of the work I've gotten involved in. On that note, I sent you another location last night, did you get it?"Everything she'd seen about Cerberus made her more and more ruthless when it came to them. They were the worse sort of human beings - at least Mayuri made an attempt to alleviate human suffering. Mostly.
If she meant by his using human suffering to solve other human suffering? Yes, he did that. In copious amounts. But some blood, sweat, and tears had to be shed for any advancements to be made. It was simply the way of things. That and a whole lot of spying on people like Quincies, and probably on substitute Shinigami.
"I did. They've been of great use," he told her. "Especially those that were still breathing, once they were stabilized. I've only managed to cause the death of two of them, and the longer they last, the better. Pff. Human bodies are so frail. It's difficult to run ongoing trials, if they keep liquefying or suffocating in the blink of an eye."
“I really don’t want to know.” She held up a hand and got herself settled in preparation for her modifications. She turned her pain sensors off, since it wasn’t like anesthetic actually worked on her. The bubble showed code, this time, instead of words.
"Are you certain? Sometimes it's fascinating to observe, once one starts to think of it on a purely scientific or medical level." He looked up at the code and appeared to be reading along, like he was transfixed, for a moment. "How enlightening. It switched forms of communication in response, indicating there is a relation much like a transmission signal, originating from the host."
He made sure she was secure before he began by hooking her up to the computers, using the ports on the back of her neck.
"We'll simply do the diagnostics first and see where things need addressed," he told her, as he turned to type in the code for retrieving the pertinent information. "You have been busy lately. It wouldn't do if you were out in the field and had a malfunction. Your body is incredibly durable, but it can be damaged. Or it could fall into the wrong hands, if you have a partial shut down and are unable to react. That is why it is always good to have a contingency plan or backup."
Like Nemu, but he wasn’t going to go re-building her. She was only useful as a prop or to take damage in his stead, but that was about it. Sometimes, in his dreams, he wanted to break her into pieces. Just to fix her again followed by another breaking to bits, when she did something utterly inept.
At least she was fixable, which was the entire point of her meager existence.
“It’s a risk in my line of work, but a necessary one. Even in the dreams I had regular maintenance. I guess you’ve replaced those guys.” She smiled lightly. “I’d close my eyes but I probably need to keep them open. I’ll shut down my eyelids.”
"Perhaps they'll show up. It seems like some of those from my own dreams have decided to grace this area with their presence." Mayuri didn't sound too pleased about that, but he was distracted by the information streaming on the monitors. "Yes, do that. It may be a bit disconcerting when I need to access your ocular cavities, but I will give you warning before I do."
He moved to get the instruments to do that, seeing where he needed to make adjustments and to work on her overlaying visuals and sensor filtering.
Motoko sighed. She wouldn’t mind Batou or the others being around. They were all very good and she could trust them with her life, and frankly Batou was one of the few men she found attractive. Dealing with the Cerberus situation would be a little more fun with them. And she wouldn’t have to enlist known assassins like Gin to keep their eyes on things.
Mayuri had turned around with the tray of tools in his hands, read what her balloon said, and nearly dropped the tools. The entire tray rattled, as he hissed, "Ichimaru Gin."
In a huff, he stalked over and leaned in so that Motoko could see his face. Luckily he put the tools down and wasn't brandishing one of them, or throwing it across the room. He looked about ready to.
"You know Ichimaru Gin? And he's an assassin?" Mayuri's head twisted much like an owl's would, until the bones in his neck made a slight crunching sound and his ear looked like it was smashed into his very much unraised shoulder. "How well that fits him, since he seems to enjoy stabbing others in their backs. Do not trust him. You will regret it."
“You know Gin?” She followed him with his eyes. “I’ve been trying to pin some murders on him for years. He has Yakuza links, just none I’ve ever been able to prove. He’s like a ghost. But right now, I need a ghost and maybe I can get what I need from my target out of him and pin something on him so I can arrest him.”
"Tchhh! That's because he is a ghost. More or less. Have you not thought to scan me, Motoko-chan?" Mayuri's head moved like it was entirely dependent on clockwork gears, what with the way it inched its head upright again, after making a positively inhuman motion. For all anyone knew, his neck probably did contain gears, now. "We're not alive like the rest of the humans around us are. You cut us, we bleed, but it's not the same as if I were to cut into one of those bodies you leave for me. They're frail and we are not. We’re soul reapers. The rules of this world are different than where we are from. We don't even need the constructed body here to be seen and interact, just as there are ghosts and superhumans running around...and all things which rules do not apply to, including yourself."
Mayuri reached for some of the tools to remove Motoko's face and access her eyes.
"You will have a very hard time proving any ties with that one. He is annoyingly clever and finished in one year, what took most at least five years to do," he explained, as he started to remove the faceplate. "One of those annoying child prodigies. He also betrayed everyone in our society by siding with someone who was intent on overthrowing what was essentially God, himself. The ex-Captain Ichimaru is a liar and a traitor, and the cause of enough problems, that I had to help fix. It took me away from my labs, which I hate, because some of the things I study are time-sensitive, or hinged on monitoring the connection from the world of the living, to the world of the dead. Even now, I am certain...if some of us had a chance, we would tear him apart. We would not think twice about it. If you try to use him, he might betray you too. Beware means be aware. You should be mindful, cousin."
It was well known that Captain Hitsugaya, who was a sour faced little brat in Mayuri's memory, had absolutely no love for Gin.
“That’s the third most disturbing thing I’ve heard this year,” Motoko remarked. She would have blinked her eyes, but her face was removed. “So the next question is, how do I take him down if I have to?”
"You can't. He would take you down from a mile away," Mayuri said with a note of displeasure in his voice. He began to remove her left eye. "I remember that I recorded certain areas, including combat training. Ichimaru Gin is faster the closer you get to him, enough to fend off opponents as strong as he is, and deadlier even further away, since he can leave you in two pieces. He would have our legs left running, and your torso left behind them, on the ground. It was Aizen Sosuke, leader of the three traitors, that reportedly killed Ichimaru. He was the one that wanted to overthrow the Soul King, which is our version of God, and one of the handful of those higher in power than ourselves. It would take one of us, or more than one of us in a group, to bind him in place and kill him."
Mayuri had the left eye out and was placing the new component into the hole left there, as he suggested, "Scan him, or try to, when you see him next. I don't want to give that despicable worm the benefit of the doubt, but he hasn't made a move since we both arrived here. And neither of us are entirely like we were, in the place we came from. I was far, far more sadistic, and he has yet to try to help anyone overthrow society as we know it."
After a pause to secure the piece in place, Mayuri asked her, “What was the first and second most disturbing things you’ve heard this year?”
"Number 2 is what you just told me," she admitted. It was odd. She could tell there was pressure and changes going, but couldn't really feel it, which wasn't a bad thing. "And I was just being facetious. Generally everything about you is disturbing."
"You're only getting a SRDI designed octopus toy for Christmas," Mayuri groused, while making adjustments and putting the eye back in. "Don't use it for sexual escapades. It got stuck in a test subject. They volunteered and signed a waver with the legal department. Don’t ask."
Once that eye was done and he was removing the right eye to repeat the procedure, Mayuri said, "If you scan Ichimaru Gin and have confirmation that he is not reading the same as those around him, then it is enough that you will know what he doesn't want everyone else to know, and you will have an advantage."
He was all about having an advantage over his foes, and so expected that his cousin should do the same.
"It isn't always about strength. There are enough of those barbarian fighting neanderthals running around, without having the intelligence to outwit them. Would you like to blow him up? I have some reishi explosives that might suffice, but using them in a populated area may cause casualties."
That last part sounded like it would be delightful. Please cause casualties. Mayuri likey.
"Too bad. That might be fun," Motoko joked. "No, I don't want to risk casualties. I'll scan him and see what comes up, and decide what to do from there. I never got maliciousness when I was tracking him, though. I need more information to go on."
"Being malicious likely would not work with him, since he apparently enjoys playing games. There is an unspoken agreement between he and I. He knows I am watching, he does nothing. He does nothing, I do not need to intervene. There is less risk of destruction of my lab, and he gets away with his life. But until he does something wrong again, he is blameless. That is the unfortunate thing, because he gets by, by being noticed when he wishes to be. The next, he is gone. His movements were hard for me to follow, even in my dreams, and I didn’t always know where he was going. I had most of the Seireitei being monitored and even I lost track. Also, if he is missing suddenly because he was dead, then people will ask questions, and I can not risk that sort of attention. Maybe you can."
Mayuri finished and started putting that eye back into it's socket, followed by putting the faceplate back on.
"Scan him and see. And you are allowed to run the scan on me, and we will take note of the data. Following a brief download, you should be able to record more than merely temperature and certain spectrums. You may wish to try to scan for reishi particles or electromagnetic frequencies. That might help you determine if he's the same type of being as I am."
He moved away to a computer terminal and typed in a file number, then downloaded the files into her cyberbrain, so she had access to the various filters and display readouts.
“He’s a ghost,” Motoko repeated. “In my dreams we called the human soul a ghost. Ghosts in the machine because the human body didn’t matter any more.” She knew it wasn’t exactly the same, but Gin and Mayuri were ghosts in a different way. It was still close enough, as far as she was concerned.
"There is a difference," Mayuri explained, even though he read it in the bubble. His explanation wasn't unkind, but meant to be strictly informative. "There are humans who die, in the dreams that we came from, and they become ghosts. If they remain in the human world too long without passing on, they become hollows. Those are monsters that feast on the other souls around them, or attack those who are spiritually sensitive, becoming stronger and more powerful with each kill. Shinigami exist to stop those creatures, as well as cleanse the souls that linger, so they move on to the next life, in Soul Society, where the dead live, until the cycle goes back and forth, between death and rebirth.
"One of my duties as a Captain and a Shinigami, was to monitor those two worlds, so that the balance of souls and the line dividing the two, were kept in check and not in danger of overlapping. If they were to overlap, the collapse and subsequent destruction of both worlds would occur. It was possible to visit the world of the living, by using what we called a precipice world to travel between. We monitored that, as well. It was a space without time, as it were, to go from one place to another. That way, it was possible for us to secure both places, and keep such balances in check.
"Ultimately, we are more than merely ghosts," Mayuri finished, as he started calibrating everything that needed adjusting. "We are the superheroes of ghosts. There are few of us in comparison to all the souls in the living world and the world of the dead, which is merely another life that people pass into, to and fro. Perhaps that makes more sense, without my over complicating it by bringing in the Arrancar and Espada? Superhero ghosts. Yes. Since our powers are all different, and even among the talented souls...there are so few at our level, or capable of fully grasping our level of power and abilities."
“That’s actually really interesting. I take it things don’t always go so well? They never go so well.” Motoko processed that information, filing it away to consider later. She could see a whole level of metaphysical asshattery.
It was a lot of metaphysical asshattery. The SRDI in his dreams was also responsible for cell phone signal transmissions from Shinigami out in the field in the world of the living, which was a whole other fine mess that Mayuri had a department overseeing. Some of those text messages were outrageous, and more so if Captain Kyoraku was trying for the billionth time to woo his lieutenant and she was shunning him non stop, as usual. Drunk pervert.
"You're correct. They didn't go well. Only this world is different from that one. It’s cut off somehow. There are no signals that I can find, to reach the Soul Society. And I can only imagine that maybe it was my time to die there, so my soul returned to the living and I grew up here. Or perhaps I ended up in a smaller dimensional pocket world, and when I die here, I can return there. It is my hypothesis, at least. Either way, I will have a laboratory waiting for me."
He stood back and grinned, his teeth gleaming gold in the light of the monitors.
"Attempt to scan me now and tell me if you see anything out of the ordinary showing up."
Her vision shifted into the infrared, then into ultraviolet. It was remarkable how quickly her mind adapted to the new input. Her scans seemed to be improved as well. She tried to process the readings from Mayuri. “This input is insane. I haven’t seen anything quite like this before.”
Nearby, a wide-eyed Mayuri tilted his head and considered this a success. It would help immensely when he attempted to implant Canaan as well, only not to the same degree or intensity that Motoko was utilizing. The young woman already had enough problems, with her own brain switching to different visual modes of it's own. He simply had to try to counteract it for when she didn't want it, and enhance it when she did.
"Yet you aren't reading me as a normal human," Mayuri finally said, turning to the monitors again so he could read the output and see through her eyes, if only temporarily. He looked more like a dark shadow in the infrared, with defined lines around it. In the ultraviolet, he was a pale blob of purple. "I can see that. I am more defined in the infrared spectrum than others, but glow more with the ultraviolet filter. Try combining the two at the same time. It should render things more easily traceable and you'll find that you have the ability to layer multiple filters at the same time."
“No, you’re not normal.” Neither normal, nor human. Motoko chuckled to herself. “Okay that’s trippy. I like that. The applications are immense.”
"It will prove useful. Experiment with it, and you should find the results to be satisfactory. If you partition out that data, I will go over it at a later time."
He made sure everything was securely fastened and in no danger of having her face pop off or an eye pop out, before he disconnected her from the computers. Then it was a simple matter of pressing a button so she was free to leave the framework of her own accord.
"I suppose this means that I can leave the problem of monitoring Ichimaru Gin to you," he said, stepping out of the way, "or to one of the other Captains in the area, provided they are strong enough in power to do so. I really don't want to be bothered with him, since it's too time consuming. If he becomes an issue, however, I wish to be notified and he will be dealt with, accordingly."
“Gee, I appreciate the gesture,” Motoko replied. She liked being a little sarcastic every once in awhile. It was better than being super serious like she dreamed she was. It was always in her private moments that she relaxed and let herself enjoy life, so she made a conscious effort to do that around people now. “I’ll keep you in the loop, cousin.”
"And I appreciate the sentiment. Speaking of which? I also do not think you can interrupt that transmission," Mayuri said while pointing up at that all-too-informative narration balloon. "There is a link in your data that it is gathering information from, but there appears to be no way to stop it. At least for the time being, and definitely not for those humans who are being affected by it."
In other words, everyone would have to wait it out, until Orange County stopped screwing with them and the problem ceased to exist.
“I really hate California sometime,” she remarked, bringing her fingers to her face as she reactivated her tactile sensors. It took a moment for her to adjust to being normal again. She tried a few other inputs. “Was x-ray intentional…?”
"On humans? Yes. You may be able to see if they are armed under their clothing or not, much like those infernal scanners in airports. Do you want it removed?"
“No. This’ll prove useful,” she replied. She wouldn’t even use it to leer!