multiversallogs | to be fair, radiostar drew first blood.

Entry tags:

to be fair, radiostar drew first blood.

Who: Sunny, Jae-Hyun Kim
What: Spoilers: waffles.
Where: SMB Radio
When: Veerdi.
Warnings: TBA.

There seems to be a trend of threes, with regard to businesses. Some attempt to truck on as normal-- there's a bakery in Chimer that sees fresh bread and pastries every morning before dawn, come rain, hail, or dragons, in a sort of work ethic stoicism that doesn't so much ignore the threat of the siege as it does attempt to contribute a little normalcy. (He stops there first.) Others have shut down completely - Bluejay isn't couriering shit, which Sunny was alright with. Most of his colleagues retreated to safety, and those that could still travel around safely - mostly himself and the girl with the broomstick - continued to do so. And then there's the halfway trend, as with SMB Radio, which limp on, adapting to the situation, providing a service they weren't before.

Sunny travels by bike, today. Extreme demonstrations of magic are not what he's accustomed to using every day, and he prefers, a little, the mundane rattle of the vehicle beneath his hands than effortlessness. When the street is trecherous from debris or otherwise, he carries it on his back.

Outside the station, he locks up the bike, holds onto the little white cardboard box he's brought with him, and texts the following to Jae:

Hello I am outside **/

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Though he's slept less and worked more than he has in years, Jae feels - well, he doesn't feel good, of course, but he feels surprisingly okay. A tolerant, 'Well, given context' okay, but okay nonetheless. He's never pictured himself in any kind of leadership position and frankly still finds the idea of it alarming, but he's been able to function... okay. There's all kinds of 'you should have been an action reporter!' and 'you're so promoted after this if we don't all die', but the truth is, it's really fortunate for everyone involved that his boss and some of her peers ponied up and helped wrangle his nebulous and probably dangerous idea into something workable, and that SMB has such good technical support. Sometimes, when he's in the sound booth he's claimed as his own cubicle, housing his sleeping bag and a lantern, he imagines doing this by himself and knows it would be a disaster worth of legend.

When he gets the text, Jae smiles - almost against his will - and with a quiet word to the other employee working dispatch (one of the coffee gophers around the office, who came in enthusiastically when she heard the first broadcast), he slips downstairs and outside. Little starry eyes, he thinks, and then whatever else prompted that thought flits away as he tastes fresh air; going out there still wigs him out a little, even though the courtyard and several meters in every direction is warded.

His appearance - warm jacket, a beanie, and, yes, his glasses - betrays the fact that he (or someone in his stead) went back to Creekside to nab his vitals. But it paints a better picture than days before, when he looked like humanform reheated week-old diner food. Jae reaches through the ward line to take Sunny's hand so that he can pass through, and cracks a lopsided smile.

"Hey."

Jae is greeted by his own reflection cast double in Sunny's sunglasses, but his eyes probably match the bright smile comes along automatically with greeting. Compliant to being led by the hand passed the invisible wards erected, that nag at his senses like a noise with no source, this place is quasi-familiar in that he's been here before, but not exactly anything close to setting up camp here. "This is for you," he says, lifting the box to almost (Jae's) chin height before lowering it again. There's a warm, syruppy smell that comes from it. "Or me, if you hate it."

His fingertips do like a musical tapdance against the back of Jae's hand. "You look good," he says, in that tone that people take when they didn't really begin to measure how shitty you must have felt before for all that Sunny witnessed the everything first hand.

Whatever is in that box smells like Jae could not hate it in a million billion years, and he's about to say so, when he is distracted by (Sunny doing that to his hand) Sunny remarking on his wilted aesthetics.

"Yes, well." He raises his eyebrows, deliberately absurd in his ultra-dignified response (in Korean, which sounds way more formal, forrealz). "I found a hairbrush. And a shower. I am killing all the ladies right now, let me tell you."

Oh, Jae. But he does look properly rested and fed, at least.

"Coffee?" Or are you just on a drive-by.

"Coffee."

Would be amazing, says an affirmative tone of voice, as well as an intention to hang out a while. Sunny hadn't laughed at Jae's antics, just grinned in a way that could be wry if not for being so shiny. "Leave some for the rest of us," he says, referring of course to the ladies, injecting a whine into his voice before finally releasing Jae's hand to go and take off his glasses and slip the arm down the front of his T-shirt.

(It has cartoon faces of the see, hear, speak monkeys on it.)

"I've actually gotten a lot of CiD numbers," he says, plainly incredulous as he leads the way inside the much-fabled (not really) SMB building. "Like, calling in and saying 'here's a tip also call me when you're off later I live nearby.' Totally mind-blowing." Not that Jae's never gotten numbers (and increasingly lewd offers... some of which he's taken up) before in his career, but right now? "People are the same everywhere, I guess."

They have to go up a couple flights of stairs in a cramped near-spiraling stairwell in one corner of the square structure, into what amounts to a break room. Jae quickly collects two cups worth of freshly-brewed office coffee (kind of horrible, but intense, and packing a lot of caffeine) which a cheeky smile for one of his co-workers who eyes Sunny and his box both, before absconding again back into the stairwell, up to the roof. On which there are lawn chairs.

He follows around like a hovering and easily distracted sort of shadow - looking around, nodding to strangers, never keeping to the left or the right for very long, but inevitably trailing after in Jae's wake. "Romance happens in all the disaster movies, have you noticed?" Sunny queries, and once they're at the lawn chairs, he goes to sit, opening up the box and offering it out. Within are two triangles, sort of a take-away version of the common waffle, crispy where maple syrup hasn't gathered in its little trapping imprinted squares. They come with napkins, for those fussy about getting it all over everything.

He seems willing enough to donate both to the cause of Feeding Jae, taking up his coffee cup to cradle close. It smells predictably toxic, in the way coffee should be when you're in an environment like this.

"Although that's really just the movies." When he sees people's ruined homes, he doesn't feel warm and fuzzy.

Being on the roof is at once disturbing and comforting, in Jae's opinion, but he finds lately that attempting to fool himself into security or ignorance just makes him ill later. There's fresh air up here, the wards still work, and even under siege, the city is beautiful. In the distance, winged workers are already rebuilding, defiant in the face of danger.

The moment there is strange. He's so ridiculously glad for waffles, both because oh my fucking god waffles, they're the best thing he's seensmelledanticipated in days, and because it gives him a minute to mull something over.

He beams at the offered food, though, and takes the clamshell box as he sits down in the opposite chair, making a noise that's both giddy and reverent and totally uncool for someone like DJ Kim. It's not a squeak.

Plunked down and delighted, he glances up first- "You already ate something, right?"

Charmed! It should be no surprise that Sunny is, because waffles are generally a good guess but he still feels good about it, and that it inspires that noise from the other man. He smiles and decides he will not be having any waffle for himself today.

"I had a--" He balances the cup between his knees, lifts his hands, makes sort of twisting motion to indicate the sort of pastry he got and consumed for himself while he'd waited on the waffles. "--with apple. There's this bakery about a block from the gym-- the one that's being a safehouse." Sunny takes back up the coffee, bringing it close to his face to hover over. "This married couple from an Earth that doesn't have any monsters or magic that they know about. They've been here like ten years, though."

Neighbours. Ones that make delicious food. He sips coffee.

Apparently satisfied with that answer, Jae nods and sips his coffee once more before setting it aside - on an overturned crate, next to an ash tray hosting a graveyard of different colored paper tubes with burned edges; the most popular use for this venue is readily apparent. He makes a thoughtful noise at the description. "My boss was born here, she's kind of like 'yeah this happens', but you can tell it's - different, you know?"

Even a lot of the naturalized citizens are panicking. He takes his first bite of waffle. Beautiful.

"So much of this feels like it should be familiar." Speaking of an Earth that doesn't have monsters or magic - theirs does. He sounds a little clumsy, saying that, because he still doesn't know how to explain 'feels', be it... Braille in his head, or just intuition.

Sunny nods. He knows. From the way even the Militia didn't mobilise as efficiently as they might have if this were a common sort of thing to have happen, although gods know they will next time. If there is one. That thought is oddly unsettling for all that it's the more constructive sort of thing for the Militia to do. Of course, he's heard some things.

What supporters of them have said about this place. "Yeah," he agrees. "But then so much of every day doesn't have much of this at all, even here." Paying bills, seeing friends, sometimes reading about a magic-related incident in the paper.

"Do you know what the others think? From the other home. I haven't really checked in." He isn't actually friends with them. Ilde is nice and comes across as another predator trying to find where they understand one another in the food chain.

It was uncomfortable and mollifying to find out that his apartment building had been saved thanks to Militia intervention - it was their swift application of technology that kept the river in Creekside from caving in, and their widespread wards that have kept all the horrors out since. It's still not the safest ever, but it's secure. Jae's not entirely sure if he has it in him to be any kind of anarchist revolutionary, but he isn't a fan of the Militia; and yet in this crisis, the deep necessity for that kind of entity within Baedal is clear.

"I talked to Ilde," he says, muted halfway. "She's with - Hasibe. Norea's real name. What's left of her." Saying it out loud feels strange. He remembers that guy remarking Well she's probably dead and that's sort of what Jae thinks, too. Witch or not, being translucent to protect a neighborhood full of serial killers seems like it might have done her in. He's not sure where he stands on any of that. "That shit in the sky - it's what destroyed their world. Geomagnetic disturbances. She says they caused the apocalypse."

That has the sky gaining a look for its troubles; its colourful scars and thunderous bruises. "There isn't a lot of world to end," Sunny comments, bringing up his coffee to sip from, then take a deeper pull when the temperature agrees with him. "It's doing a good job anyway. It's a mess out there."

Between looters, people rendered homeless, people rendered dead, overflowing triage points and sleepless vigilantes, it's about as close they will come to a taste of the apocalypse. If getting up close and personal to the river monster hadn't been enough indication.

"I know Ilde at home." A pause, he eats more of his waffles. Jae's voice is hushed, but not morose. It seems like it would be a waste to lose his appetite in the face of such a sweet gesture, even with this topic being bandied about. "Not the woman here. But her, in our world. I didn't understand why she didn't recognize me and when I did..."

Well.

It was horrible.

The bio-degradable spork is momentarily abused, his thumbnail digging into the edge of it, harmless. There's two of Ilde and, it stands to reason, two of everybody else. Jae assumes he's dead there, along with everyone he ever knew, and his entire family. It would have happened while he was still locked up.

"What if they were just the first?"

What if the apocalypse is coming for all of them. Every world.

Edited (rude dw) 2012-03-18 05:26 (UTC)

"I don't know."

Which is honest, and who does, except for the woman who is in Schroedinger existence right now? Sunny observes the surface of his coffee, bundled on the edge of the lawn chair rather than lazing back on it as man willed it be used. "It reminds me of that question, about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. When you don't know what an angel is supposed to look like, how big they can be, how you quantify them, or even-- what kind of pin it is.

"But that one is more whimsical than this one." This one is super depressing. "I guess it might make sense if Baedal is sort of like a refuge. A really small one, like a life raft."

They've all been collected here, and the monster is still just outside the door. He wonders, but doesn't dare articulate, if they brought it here with them. If Baedal chose them and they're ruining everything; fate keeps pulling in these people with all these spider-web connections to each other, did they pull in the end of the world, too? It's a bleak thought. Jae would take his own life in an instant if he knew it would help avert oblivion for a world, but he's not anyone important. There's nothing he can do.

"I never believed in angels," he says instead, just as muted. The edges of his mouth hint at a private smile, but a tired one. "That whole thing, it never sank in with me. Did they - uhm." An awkward pause, and he does smile a bit more now, lopsided. "You're from Busan, right?" (His cute accent.) "I guess it's weird to ask if you were raised Christian." So much of Korea is, anymore.

"Why would it be weird?" Sunny asks, with a sudden smile, rubbing the corner of his eye to ease an itch, but he tips his head in a no sort of gesture. "My mom was raised Buddhist, but it was sort of a secular place to be, growing up. I'm not really anything. I'm guessing someone tried it at you, if it didn't sink in?"

His whole childhood was weird. He likes to think his mom must have known something, and that the echoed pangs of affection he has for them are simply that in return for him as well instead of complete, hurt confusion on the rift that developed, the one he was basically born with. Raising a stranger in your house must have been as strange for them as it was for him.

"I never met any angels, so I can't say I believe in them," he concedes.

"I don't know if it's something people talk about," he concedes, where 'people' is fairly obviously referencing 'Korean people', which is... a significantly weirder thing for him to say than asking about Christianity. Some part of him is faintly relieved Sunny isn't particularly religious. The dovetail of Confucius and the western God has always unnerved him.

And nerves are still present, though not directly related - Jae can't seem to decide if he wants his coffee or not; he picks it up, puts it back down facing another direction, moves it, tries again, lets it alone.

"Sort of." Tried it, he means. "We moved around a lot." The edge of the (empty if slightly soggy in the aftermath) box, now, suffering an absent-minded attack from his thumbnail, the edge worried at. He wonders if Sunny's already guessed, because he's always paranoid about his accent in Korean. And it's been so long. "I'm from Osaka." ... Which is not a fact on DJ Kim's wiki entry.

"Really?" indicates that Sunny didn't have a clue, actually; maybe been away from the language too long or just wasn't paying enough attention, or maybe Jae's accent really isn't that much at all and his paranoia is baseless. Either way, he seems curious instead of-- anything else. Some nations have the most passive aggressive of relationships, particularly after feud, war, occupation.

Baedal is unique that way, too. There's no diplomat for international affairs, and most of the people the cohort newbies are steered to interact with are imports themselves, otherworld ex-pats. "When did you move?"

It seems at once like a stupid thing to keep secret in Baedal, and like something he's still terrified of. It's even more abnormal than being an American-English-Korean or a sorcerer, and nobody's going to understand even a little. Sunny, though, might grasp context, and he might look at Jae like he's a total freak, or... be fine. Apparently. He clutches the box a little, still, not sure how he feels about telling anyone (for the first time, ever), but suddenly wanting to. He's not sure if he wants to just to say it, or if he wants Sunny to know.

Feelings are mysterious.

"I was eleven," he says. "In Japan, it was hard for us. My father's family..." all right, he's not ready to talk about North Korea. "It was important, that we not be Japanese. Our community there was small." And brutal, his tone suggests, but if Sunny knows any little bit about Zainichi culture - which he might not, given the obscurity and otherwise polite disdain from mainland Korean perspectives - that shouldn't be a surprise. "So it was Confucianism and Buddhism and whatever Shinto rubbed off, which was inevitable."

He forces himself to drink some of his coffee. "My parents had enough of politics, and we moved to New York. Most everyone Korean in Manhattan was Christian, we were kind of the weirdos. So people tried, yeah. And they tried in Seoul, when I went home. It really bothered me. It felt so dishonest."

Sunny listens with his chin planted in his hand, unironically, to the things that don't go onto DJ Kim's wiki page. It's interesting, sure, the way politics and history and religion and cultural invasion tend to roll over like vast, sleeping giants and disrupt and scatter the smaller particles. His own sense of time is vast, with human life being this fast and furious microcosm of activity. It makes him miss Korea, sometimes, in a sort of anxious way.

"You have a different view than a lot of people," he says, and of course he means Korean people. "Which isn't always the most comfortable thing. What's England like?"

His dim impression of London being rain, and scarves, and multiculturalism. He remembers, too, the things that Kasu had liked to talk about, where second generation Koreans gather densely, the supermarkets, the protestant churches with sermons in the language.

Jae's never been sure if his views make him more or less Korean - or if that's even a thing. The idea that Koreans 'should' be Christian makes him unsettled and the more he thinks about it the more twisted into knots his stomach becomes; how can they be so nationalistic and proud of their Koreanness, when they've let this western religion devour them whole? The thought of being metaphorically eaten strikes him as even more disturbing now, but he's not sure why.

"Cold," he says, smile wry but genuine. "It doesn't snow very much in London. It's grey and when it does it's slushy and gross. But it's really urban, and they leave all the old buildings there until they disintegrate." He looks out at the skyline, blurring into darkness. "America was so aggressive and Seoul..." he trails off, there, and for a hundred reasons, doesn't clarify why he left South Korea. Maybe it's because he hated k-pop. Maybe it's because he held Sunny's hand too sincerely. "London was everything without being pretentious, even if it was just as screwed up as anywhere." He looks over at Sunny. "What's Busan like?"

"Warm." Not just to play opposites, but it's the first thing Sunny thinks about since moving to Moscow. "And always growing. Usually upwards. I don't remember a time when I wasn't moving through the central business district and something wasn't being built. I guess in preparation for some indeterminable point in the future when everyone would want to come to Busan when it's done, but I don't think it ever would be."

Sunny smiles, and takes a longer sip of cooling coffee, bitterer without its heat. "It's really pretty, though. I miss living on the coast. I tried to, here."

And of course he'd already known that Jae lived in the UK. Knowing who he was at all was comparable with knowing this fact. But having that context, the journey and the dislocation and his perception lends it depth and texture, makes it familiar almost in a way that Sunny would feel truly silly to explain.

Edited (whoops) 2012-03-21 08:19 (UTC)

"I wish I'd gone." Busan - everywhere on Earth - seems like a missed opportunity, now. The furthest south he'd gotten for purposes beyond fleeing the country, well...

"I like the beach here." Creekside is close enough that he feels coastal, even through he's not right on the water; any closer and he'd worry about fog tsunamis, or something, but he feels better when he's close enough for government work. He can't blame that one on claustrophobia - even as a child, he preferred port cities. A product of growing up in two.

"Where did-" he's about to ask where he went, if he missed Busan before Baedal and was working as a translator, but his CiD beeps at him. "Sorry," he says, flashing Sunny an apologetic look before sitting up to get a better look at it and reply to a few messages - work-related, or he wouldn't bother.

Sunny waits patiently, initially, casting a look out beyond the rooftop before finishing the dregs of his coffee. It's early enough that there's plenty of sunlight to see by should he want it, upon heading out, and he has the inkling that he ought to leave Jae to it. He sort of rocks forward like he might stand, but doesn't make it all the way just yet, hands planted on either side of himself against seat edge.

"It's good that we're from the same time and place, ish," Sunny says. "If it works out that we disappear back, that we remember stuff, we should both go to Busan. I'll probably be all homesick by then."

He thinks that's true, even, despite this being an incredibly hypothetical train of thought.

Something about the idea of visiting Busan with Sunny makes Jae ridiculously happy - so much that he immediately dies a little of embarrassment inside, and if he didn't have so much experience keeping it cool as DJ Kim, he might have visibly facepalmed. His internal monologue at present is a kind of shrieking 'WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU'. It's very special.

Outwardly, he's cool as a cucumber, and just looks up and smiles a bit. Jae's being called back inside for some breaking news duties, so this has to be cut short. But before then-

"Okay." He reaches out, and then extends his pinky finger at Sunny. "When we go home. Call me."

Promise?

Cool as cucumber is not a thing that Sunny occupies his time attempting, and so his smile is bright and immediate. He's allowed. He's not DJ Kim. Mouth pressed in a thin, muppety smile, he curls his pinkie around Jae's in binding contractual agreement, tugging once.

"I'll find some fangirl stalkers to get your number off of," he agrees, dutifully, before bouncing to his feet. "I never ascended to that level, personally."

"It's okay, I actually read all the email I get off the website." What a nerdy admission - but it's true. He doesn't actually get all that much that he can't go through it time to time. "Title it 'Sunny from Baedal', I don't think I'd ever mistake it for junk mail."

And with that, he drops his hand. Promise made, and you can't break pinkie ones. It's serious.

"I have to get back down and help." Sunny, who's been by before, will know he's more than welcome to stick around even while Jae's busy - and if not, the wards will let him leave as he wishes (it's coming inside that needs permission). "...Thank you. For the waffles." And coming by. And listening to him ramble like he's in a confessional. And promising to go to Busan with him.

Jae doesn't totally believe that this siege will let up, or that they'll live too long. He believes even less that they'll ever go back home. Having some little glimmer of silly, playful hope shouldn't spark anything in him.

He's glad it does anyway.

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to be fair, radiostar drew first blood.

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