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MASK OR MENACE, HEROPA; floating in a most peculiar way.

[ The mood of the street changes when it begins to rain with a cheerful summery patter that is nevertheless relentless enough to cause a stir. Umbrellas bloom and raise. Footsteps quicken, and the open-sky mall clears of people as they change their trajectory for cover.

Except for Teddy Flood.

It's been some minutes. Water gathers between the crevices of the bricked ground he stands on, boots fixed in place, and rain strikes off the wide brim of his hat, finding a path to run and coming down at a intermittent trickle down his back. The flare of his jacket only barely protects where his conspicuous revolver hangs at his hip, because he's making no effort to do so. He's making no effort at all, still as a statue. Not even breathing.

His blue eyes seem both blank and focused on some mysterious point in the air, raised up, roughly towards where the city skyline looms up into the patchwork clouds above. He is midstep, one hand raised, his expression relaxed into inscrutable.

Some pause to take in the sight of him, as if judging whether or not this is some kind of street performance. Someone's shoved a five dollar note into his breast pocket. Others snap pictures.

Teddy doesn't notice, watching the sky. ]

MASK OR MENACE, NETWORK; the stars look very different today.

excuse me i seem to have fallen
off the beaten trail you wouldn't
happen to know which direction
lies sweetwater would you

MASK OR MENACE, HEROPA; planet earth is blue and there's nothing i can do.

[ Metal-shod hooves click and plod on wooden planks as Teddy slowly steers his horse across the boardwalk. He cuts a distinct figure amongst the beach-going Floridians, boots dusty, hat unironic, good form in his saddle and an openly carried gun at his hip. The novelty drags some glances his way, and he tips a nod to those nearer without too much in the way of conviction.

Because he is distracted.

A subtle redistribution of his weight in the saddle is enough to stop his horse from his slow meander to a halt as Teddy looks out over glittering blue ocean. After a moment, he swings his way out of his saddle, touching down with the subtle thump of boots on plank, the jingle-jangle of horse tack. Keeping leather reins wrapped over his knuckles, he moves closer to where wooden railing bars off the drop onto the yellow sand that stretches off into the frothy waves. ]

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Teddy is impervious to what would have been a spectacular view, and unflinching when a towel is draped over his shoulders, and unresponsive when she offers her gentle rebuke. However, there's a life boarded up inside of him when Mako goes to make her evaluation. The technology doesn't sink of perfectly, but perhaps both are suitably advanced enough that signals can be detected that at least indicate that he is precisely what she expects him to be.

He also isn't broken, although that focus grouped face remains unmoving, still staring skywards, even if now all he sees is a ceiling.

But there seems to be some kind of internal errored loop that just needs a little untangling--

In building her own AIs Mako had determined that she could work through the errors if she mentally connected to them. It wasn't really a Drift, though, but it was more of a connection with a fine touch to, say, detangle a sequence. So, she reaches out in just the same way she had to them, and though it seems to take ages, she very gently manages to set the error right and slip back out again.

Her nascent AIs weren't that complex. By the time she came back to herself, it was much later.

"Hopefully," she murmured, "you can sort yourself out, now."

Theodore Flood's return to the world of the living comes mostly with a slow breath inwards, that blank expression resolving into something else. It's not quick, exactly, and he spends several seconds absorbing the place he is in. Whatever it is about the laboratory -- strikingly different to his antiquated costume, his old timey revolver -- seems to settle in his nerves, and he relaxes.

His eyes settle on Mako, and his hand comes up to find the edge of his hat in subtle salutations.

Mako's patient, though she leans her chin on her hand to watch him as he resurfaces. Amazing design, incredibly lifelike. Beautiful, really.

"There you are," Mako says with a smile, her head tilting slightly,a slice of bright blue hair settling sharply against her jawline. "Welcome back."

"I can't say I recall making your acquaintance, ma'am."

The apologetic tone in his voice is only subtle, a subdued instinct towards being polite in the first instance. His accent is much the same, expected by the looks of him without being outright cartoonish. Teddy breaks his attention from her, takes in his surroundings once more. "But I been here before, one time or another."

"You were out in the rain in Heropa, I brought you to De Chima," she says quietly. Her laugh stays at that volume and there's definite amusement in her voice. "I guess it really is a welcome back, then. I'm Mako Mori and this is the laboratory where I work on very small robots."

"Much obliged, Ms Mori."

The word robots is heard but unresponded to, Teddy taking a step aside as he goes to move around the space with the same sort of restless ease as if she'd let a tired coyote through her door. Much like the incremental motions she's already seen, the rest of his motor functions are smooth, lifelike, unhitching.

Perhaps too smooth, at that. "Teddy Flood," he says, on that delay, tipping a nod to her. It's then that he seems to notice the towel, and he goes to drag it off his shoulders, bunching terrycloth in his hands with a pause, before he goes to fold it over an arm.

Low-key amusement takes over his confusion. "And it seems I owe you one."

"Glad to help, Teddy," she says and then shakes her head a little, raising a hand briefly. "No, no. You don't owe me anything. I'm just glad you're okay. You were a bit," she hums a little as she tries to find a word, "out of it and with the rain--"

Mako shrugs and offers a small smile.

She watches him move about without much concern, pleased to see he can walk about without issue. It puts her at ease.

"I was a bit worried for awhile." Nonresponsive gentlemen in the streets tend to provoke a certain sense of concern.

She shrugs, and Teddy gives an indistinct nod, an easy smoothing over of whatever gaps of knowledge lies between them. His overriding directive is one of immersion, and interrupting every sentence to clarify what any given guest means would only entangle them in the mechanics of the thing.

"No need to be concerned," he assures easily, instead, finding a place to set down the towel. "A little rain never hurt nobody."

Although on that note, he does take his gun out from his holster -- turning his shoulder to her so as to avoid causing alarm -- and with the slickness of a well oiled machine, checks it over with faint, metallic clicks. "You in the business of rescuing lost souls? Or was this a one time type of circumstance."

Edited 2016-11-16 09:40 (UTC)

She nods thoughtfully, watching him take the gun she hadn't confiscated. If he'd wanted, there had been more than ample enough time to shoot her with it. There still is. But she has unseen armor to protect her and wings if need be.

"I think it might have veered into habit, here," Mako says with a laugh as she thinks about Daryl, Carl, Enid, and pretty much all of the people she now has ties with. "Then again, we're all lost souls and we're always being found by someone."

The gun is put away again once he's satisfied, and Teddy smiles at her more around the eyes than he does his mouth.

"Sounds romantic," he says. Romannic. "And like someone I know."

Because of course there's a girl, the mere mention of whom often triggers his immediate departure in his fruitless pursuit of her, but in this instance, his own script allows him sly reference without all out anxiety. "World needs more heroes. Balances out the bad."

"Hopeful, perhaps," Mako murmurs. "Is that a someone who might be here? It's said that people from the worlds we came from can come through the Porter, but I haven't seen anyone from my world show up. I keep looking, though."

He's right, though, the world does need more heroes. She studies his face for awhile with curiosity.

"It does balance out the bad. There's so much of that already. Where I come from, I help protect the world from monsters, so doing the same here isn't much of a stretch."

"She lives on a ranch a ways out of Sweetwater," Teddy says, which is something of a no to her answer as to whether this someone is in fact here, save for that Teddy seems to expect that Mako knows the town he speaks of. "Has a way of looking at the world like it's full've meaning."

And beauty, but that's the kind of talk he thinks Dolores gets away with better than himself. He nods to Mako then, saying, "If that's so, maybe I'll see you out on the road sometime. Lot of monsters need chasing 'round these..."

But that's not true, is it? No bounties to hunt, no paths to take.

"'Round these..."

The repetition doesn't kickstart his script, and his eyes focus past her, expression smoothing out of confusion into the same kind of passive blankness he'd been in when he'd frozen, when she'd found him.

"Oh no," Mako says softly, moving across the space to take his hand. At contact, she reached out like she'd done before, nudging herself back in get him right out of that loop again.

"Come back, Teddy. Please stay and talk with me." She murmurs useless things, then, things that don't matter as she works to pull him back once more. There's got to be something she can do to help him not, well, spin like a toy top.

His hand is pliant, lax in her hand. Warm, like a person's would be, made of stuff engineered to resemble it. Pupils shrink, expand, as if light were flashing in and out of them. The command to improvise, improvise, improvise flickers through his processes, and her nudge, just in time, breaks the loop before it can error out completely.

The next breath in is sharper, his hand twitching in hers.

"Monsters," he says again. When he resumes, it's ever so slightly halting, but as if attempting to resume the conversation like there was no break. "Problem being, they look a lot like regular men."

Her fingers curl a little more against his hand as she peers at him with a little wrinkle of a frown. This is more than a little troubling and Mako refuses to leave him alone if he was going to freeze up like this.

"The monsters look like men from your universe?" Mako asks very softly, afraid that's not the best question to ask right now. But if she has to ease him out of another loop, at least she can. The word monster has been around longer than human beings have had speech. Men could be monsters the same as Kaiju were monsters, different in their ways, but similar. Mako pauses for a moment. That wasn't really important.

"You went away again."

She tugs at him gently in an attempt to get him to sit in her chair. He isn't physically damaged, so that can't be the issue, but there is a pretty big something going on. Like he's off track.

"Please sit? If you need to, you can tell me about them, I'll be here."

Teddy moves in a way that is both compliant with what Mako is urging him to do -- that is, sit down, which he does, obedient as a dog. Unlike a dog, his focus is elsewhere, still, slow to return to wherever it went when those errors broke him from his improvisations. He reverts to script while the white noise resolves into sensory input of the present.

"The Devil walked this earth in the guise of a man too," he continues, like she asked him, like this is the conversation they were having. "Looks, they are deceiving."

The next breath in is deeper, and his eyes focus once again, looking up towards Mako. He sees her concern, and he asks, "Is something wrong?"

"I am concerned for your wellbeing," Mako says, her voice quiet. "You have moments where you are not present and it worries me. Do you know my name?" She hasn't let go of his hand, not even as she drops down to a crouch on the balls of her feet next to him.

The contact helps. Somehow.

It's his hand caught with her hand that Teddy looks to next in a sort of mild curiousity, but he doesn't pull his out of her grip, simply looking again at her upturned face. "You're Ms Mori," he says, helpfully. Then, after a beat, he amends, "Mako."

Not present. He hesitates. The limitations of his script are such that there aren't a lot of ready responses for deeper thinking outside certain themes, but he's not without ability to improvise, even if it takes him some seconds.

"I don't mean to cause you consternation. Sometimes a man's mind wanders far when he's reminiscing."

"Good, that's right. I'm Mako," she murmurs when her name comes out. His recall was fine on that at least. "I worry that your mind will wander far when you are doing something important, like when I found you in the street. You could have been hurt."

She gently squeezes his hand.

"I can help you, though, when you wander too far and get caught in those...memories." Mako tilts her head a little. "You don't remember the rain, do you? Or where you were standing when I found you?"

How one comes to be in a place is not the sort of question he is geared towards arriving to on his own, but here it is, being asked of him. He looks aside as he thinks, his hand lax but receptive in hers. He would assure her that he's perfectly fine, because he feels perfectly fine, but then again, he feels profoundly wrong, too.

"I remember," he starts, "I remember I was exploring. Trying to get back my bearings. And I heard something, and I looked up at the sky."

Teddy pauses, then switches a look back to her. Faintly apologetic; "I don't recall the rain."

"Mmm, you were still looking up when I found you and brought you here," she murmurs. "Whatever you heard must have gotten you stuck in a memory. Like chasing Random Access Brain Impulse Triggers in a Drift, perhaps. I've done that, gotten stuck in a memory."

Her eyes search his face.

"Teddy," her expression is, in a word earnest, "you are safe with me. Even if you do get stuck. May I try something? To see if you can hear me up here?" She taps his temple gently with a forefinger. "It won't hurt at all."

It different than connecting to Daryl, very different. More like connecting to a vastly advanced Gipsy. But she's not going to do it now if he'd rather she'd not.

He'd said he'd been here before, or someplace like it, and the memory surfaces with violent intrusion, even if he is only still while he sees it. It's a woman, who has a haircut not very different from Mako's, peering at him through a set of glasses that dance with the reflections of her HUD. She is looking at him, like Mako is. No, she is looking through him, like Mako is not, and her hand touches his chin.

Alright, Teddy, says her ghost voice. Let's see how your day was. Analysis.

And now, he changes, just a little. His focus dulls, and that look of gentle concern reflected back at her evaporates as his expression goes neutral, character affect dropping like a veil.

"You can proceed with analysis," he says.

Oh.

Well, in some ways it makes sense, but it's still startling. But she reaches out with her mind and initiates the Drift as gently as possible. It's still different than it was with a human mind and it's still different than Gipsy, but the connection is smooth and easy.

Can you hear me, Teddy? she asks, her mental voice warm.

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open voicetest post.

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...oh Teddy, this is why Mako gonna protect the shit out of him