+1 fibish

[auseuil]

Honestly, he arrived as if he'd been here before. Indeed, if one wasn't already familiar with the faces in Nexus, the 'young man's' casual demeanor as he just strolled through an open door into the plaza would make it seem as if he'd spent every damn day in here. The attitude of a local or at the very least a frequent visitor, calm and mildly curious as he inspected a vending machine, milled about a screen near the plaza, lightly kicked a few benches, before eventually just draping himself all over one like a gangly teenaged octopus. A soggy bookbag, once slung over his arm, hit the pavement with a wet SPLAP as he seated himself, seaweed wound around the straps and zippers slapping the ground along with it.

The scent of the sea absolutely clung to him, the youth's overall appearance edging somewhere near 'damp'. As if he'd just crawled out of some lagoon, hair a bit too black, skin a bit too smooth. Those eyes just a little too dark. The teeth a touch too sharp. And for a while, he said nothing, apparently content to just take up the entire bench and people watch. A few minutes passed, before finally, at last, the man would speak up, his voice oddly, vaguely melodic and low.

"What's the weirdest thing you ever saw?"

Comments

[auseuil]

Most of that... flew over The Siren's head. Hey, the most complicated smart guy thing he'd ever personally dealt with had to be phones, everything said after the joke about Isamu's brother pingponged off the faerie's brain like a pinball machine.

"Uhhh...." Yeah that wasn't the smartest sound ever made. "Why'd you spell pet?" What's an acronym? Look, he taught himself how to write and that's an unholy mess of pidgin English, he's doing his best here.

"Something about an amphibian?" Anth-what on the aquiwho?

[itmeanscourage]

“Positron emission tomography, alongside magnetic resonance imaging. And no, not amphibian, the alien species is not capable of breathing water as far as I have been able to observe...” Isamu answered before it dawned on him that even with the translations of the Nexus, the being sitting before him had no idea what he was talking about.

He paused for a moment.

“Umm...” he sounded just as eloquent as the confused siren for a moment.

“My brain does not process psychic connections well. Emapthic abilities, telepathic communication, the like. And vice versa, it seems.” He tried again. “It is weird because I had been operating under the assumption that this is normal. But the reverse is true. I am the anomaly. I am as quiet to their kind - and other species with similar powers, as I have discovered somewhat recently - as they are to me.”

[auseuil]

"Uh... It's okay I'm not a psychic either." That's what that meant right? He is doing his best, he really is. "Like, that's pretty chill, if you're worried about being the weird guy because you can't hear like, thoughts and shit. That's not super weird. ... I mean unless like you're supposed to and stuff but kinda seems like it'd be a lot of trouble."

Look at that, he's even trying to be reassuring, that's a new one for him. This is how a conversation works, he's conversing.

"What's an Anthanmbian?" It's a bit of effort, to claw that word back up from his hazy, fragmented memory, buried as quickly as it was under all the other information that came with it. "... Shit how do you pronounce it?"

[itmeanscourage]

Conversing with Isamu was not always an easy task - just ask his twin brother Minoru sometime - so the siren was actually doing a very good job!

“Anthean.” He clarified. “A family unit of this near-extinct species from another planet has settled here in the Nexus. They are very bright individuals, possessing incredible mental powers like empathy and telepathy to name merely a few. Whether you, yourself are psychic does not matter in this particular instance, actually. Their powers are enough to make that connection happen all on its own.”

That certainly complicated things.

“I suppose this all arose because my brother initially found himself overwhelmed by those powers. He was pursuing a romantic relationship with a human/Anthean hybrid, which is a much longer story in and of itself really, but the important factor here was that I was attempting to study the issue scientifically in order to assist him. However, I soon discovered that I was not the control group, but rather, the experiment. As a human, their abilities should affect me, but they do not. Quite the opposite. And having encountered other telepaths, of other species, since then, I find that I have difficulty hearing their projections as well. It is quite the conundrum.”

[auseuil]

"So like.... they make you psychic? Or uh is it like uh... Shit, y'know, like a telephone? You can't call them but they can call you, but it's like.... brain calling and shit, right?" It made sense to him. If there was one piece of technology the siren had loyally and diligently kept up with, it was phones. The fact that they came with a camera was the main reason, but hey, may as well learn everything about it if he was going to own it.

"Kay so your phone is busted, that's not that bad. Like, there's other ways of talking to them, right? You can just talk with real words instead of uh.... brain words."

[itmeanscourage]

Isamu pondered his conundrum in light of the siren’s metaphor. “To use those terms, you are essentially correct. I am not able to make calls. When they call, I do not hear it ring, and they are greeted with something more akin to white noise or monotonously relaxing hold music.”

That kind of worked, actually. Common ground!

“And it is not as though I cannot communicate in other ways. Verbal communication can and does happen. For those that are not half-human, empathy makes up for a lack of facial expressions, but not being able to pick up on that has not hindered communication.”

He shook his head, returning to the metaphor again. “My phone is busted. But now pretend that I am also tech support.”