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RP: NSS Sledge Mama [NSS Sledge Mama] Into Steel (Aside): Which Tie?

"Even when its the ones you know," she snarked back more seriously, the words sarcastic yet mocking.

"Look, I know what dating is, because we do it too," Emi pointed out to him. The taste of anger aside, she added, "It's just that making a home run is faster." It was a little harsh how blunt she was being, especially with the offer he made, but it was quite true. Right now though, the young woman was looking at herself in the mirror again, now with the volumetric Periwinkle Tie in silence. She didn't let it stay silent for long though. Seeing it on herself in the mirror, Emi asked him, her voice wistful, "Did you know? Know that we're immortal? That, despite this, the oldest of us in existence is somewhere around her late twenties?" She was leaning towards its silvery surface now, a hand raised above her head and placed against it for support as she did so - Terrance could see it clearly now too. Emi's fingers were long and slender. Delicate. Beautiful even. But there were only three of them and a thumb. There was no pinky.

The lack made her hands look inhuman.

"Even then, we're made and used up just as quickly. So, I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable, but don't think of me as a slut. I just don't think I'll live that long." Turning to face him again, her hands girlishly placed behind her back - and utterly unaware that he had focused on them - Emi looked vulnerable, even as she did her best to shore herself up, brushing a hand across her chest and simply vanishing the tie. "I don't think I can even take up your offer Marine, so I'll have to turn it down."
 
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Terrence stiffened at Emi's rebuke, gaining a little color in his pale face in shame. "I'm sorry for making assumptions. There weren't a lot of members of the NMX back home for me to question." He looked at her fingers with what seemed to be a rather interested expression. It was proven aliens existed after all, so a missing finger due to genes wasn't too surprising. His head tilted to the side. "I know ya'll can switch bodies fairly easily. I don't believe you're immortal though."

Terrence looked down at his feet at the talk of death. "Hell, Emi, your chances of survival are probably higher than mine right now. You didn't come across to me as anything like that at all." He looked back up at the sounds of movement. He nearly reached up to tip his hat in respect, but then he remembered that he was wearing a beret and that they're really hard to tip seeing as they don't have his old hat's rim. Instead, he simply nodded at Emi's choice. "Alright, I understand." Terrence's expression changed right then, in confusion. "Say, you don't mind my inquirin' into why you were dressin' up?"
 
The Nekovalkyrja shrugged. "Whatever. You didn't mean anything by it anyways," she remarked.

"Even though you Nepleslians have treated me well, I really don't know what to expect from Yamatai's Star Army. I've got access to the net now, and they're not as bad as my old bosses made them out to be, but there's plenty of reasons for me to still not trust them," Emi explained. "They might just give me a rifle and armor before tossing me out into the front." Letting out a sigh, she decided to go ahead and sit down on her fold-out cot, giving her feet a moment's of rest as she pulled on a pair of socks. Moving one leg up, only to dip her foot down and into soft cloth, there was plenty of skin to be seen. "Baka. You're such a Nepleslian," the Neko rolled her eyes. "If you don't know that I'm immortal, then I'm guessing you fit that muscle headed, idiotic stereotype a lot closer than I thought. Bullets, knives and explosions will still kill us, but the fact we don't ever age is pretty much basic stuff," she pointed out.

"Anyways, since you asked about the clothes? Well, your ship's Commanding Officer is real clever. By giving us actual, real belongings, the Star Army gets annoyed since it's gotta take all our things into inventory and let us store it properly if we can't hang onto it ourselves," Emi explained to him, pointing over to a small stack of books and a set of makeup.
 
"I ain't ever heard of the Yamataians wastin' personnel and equipment like that. They'll probably treat you better than the NMX, if you don't my sayin'." Terrence assured. Last he checked, anyways, the YSA didn't waste their people on suicide charges or anything like that. He shrugged at Emi's accusation of not being an original Nep. "Eh, at the rate I was goin', I figured I'd say somethin' that would give you that impression soon enough." He said apologetically. He walked over to the books and started looking through the titles to see what kinds of books they were sending them. "Well, good to know our CO's making this a head-ache for those guys." Terrence remarked, sounding rather satisfied by the news.
 
Emi looked at him, her expression plain as she sat there on her cot.

"I see you're quite well informed on how Yamatai's Star Army operates," the Nekovalkyrja lied, the words cool and detached. Raising her arms up in the air to stretch, she let out a yawn before laying down, her head resting close to the door. "Knowing I was going to get tossed to Yamatai, first thing I did was learn as much as I could the moment I got net access," she explained to him. "At The Battle of Hoshi No Iori for an example, millions of us were killed. Using power armors as cheap fighter craft wins wars it would seem." Laying there, green hooded eyes sleepily looking up at him, Emi decided to ask him something different.

"Say, you've been really curious about me, but I haven't gotten to ask much about you. What's with the weird accent?"
 
"Ugh, I guess that one slipped under my radar." Terrence remarked, putting down the book in favor of rubbing the back of his head in embarrassment.

Terrence thought about how he should answer that question. "Well, my biological family has had the same kind of accent for as long as they've been on Desauria. That might have somethin' to do with it." He stroked his chin as he took a look into Emi's mirror to watch himself pretend to look fancy. "There aren't too many people on my planet that has the accent, but we lived in a community that shared it and some other cultural anomalies in the capital. But it was a small community at best. Small but very noticeable, especially if you hung around the natives." Terrence shrugged and turned around to look back at the Neko behind him. "I don't know how accents work, but that's my guess."
 
"That's interesting," Emi mused as he made his way to her mirror.

"So, I'm guessing your accent would be sorta like Kansai-ben?" Wiggling around in her cot to face him, she turned around so that she was not only lying on her waist, but now held her chin in one of her hands as the other idly lay on the bed. Intentional or not, the view she gave him was appreciable. "That'd make you something like...well, I can't remember the Nepleslian word for it, but someone from the countryside?" the young woman asked him. "I'm mostly an indoors Neko, so I didn't go planetside all that much. What's it like back home?" she pressed on. Despite the plain-faced stare Emi gave him, her eyes were now starting to bore into him.

It was a dead-focused curiosity that this cat had.
 
Terrence didn't feel his explanations were that interesting.

Terrence shrugged at Emi's comparison. "I wouldn't know what that means for it's literal translation." His gaze wandered into dangerous territory for a moment or two before shooting back up into her eyes. He puffed out his chest in pride at the apt description of his character. "Yep, that's me! I reckon my family has been natural colonists since the first Faraday came along." He chuckled slightly at the question of said colony. "Aw, it's a desert planet called Delsauria. As you can imagine, it's a miner's place. But it's got it's trade and tourism spots. The natives are actually a sentient race. Reptilian guys who wouldn't, sadly, survive off Delsauria without enviro-suits or somethin'. Then of course there was the other natives. We have our share of predators and prey."
 
Was he so uneducated that he didn't even know what to call himself?

That was the question that Emi was grappling with. How could the Nepleslians not have a common phrase that described someone that was from the countryside, and wasn't the brightest around? On the other hand, she did come to realize she was dealing with said person from the countryside that wasn't the brightest around. Still, curious as a cat, it was hard to tell just what her mood was against this revelation. "That's curious," she remarked, the statement neither bland or particularly excited. The phrase was just as it was said - she found it curious. Odd. "I never dealt with any of those Delsaurians, but what's this about predators and prey? Did you ever go hunting them?" the Neko asked.

She was arching her back as well tanned arms began to push her up, legs idly kicking up and down in the air - he got her attention.
 
Probably.

Terrence looked like he was having fun. "Not surprisin', they prefer to just stay on Delsauria. I guess they'd rather stay at the place of origin of their culture than complicate their own little world." He placed a hand on his chin as he remembered some of his hunting escapades with his father. "Ha, sure did. Made for better huntin' than you'd think. People usually think about forests or somethin' like that when they think about hunters. It's tougher to sneak up on things in a wide open space like the desert, so my dad and I used to jump in thin gillie suits that were fashioned to look like sand. Surprisingly effective. Anyways, the predators out there attack if they feel threatened and you didn't kill them with your first shot. Sometimes they just run away. They were never able to touch me. I missed out though, I don't have bad-ass scars to show off." A corner of his mouth sagged, giving the impression of someone who was disappointed. "I miss home already. Barely gone and I already miss it."
 
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The young woman lying on the bed leisurely kicked her legs back and forward in the air as she listened intently, but then sharply stopped.

"Wait, so let me get this straight," Emi began, finding herself having run into some sort of mental roadblock the young man had put up without knowing. "Your home was lots of wide open space, but you dressed up in camouflage to sneak up on them?" she asked, incredulously raising an eyebrow. Her legs, previously held up in the air with a hint of excitement and interest, dropped to the bed like a dead weight. "Shouldn't you have just spotted the things from far away and pick it off?" To her, it didn't make sense why anyone would take the time and effort to get close when just shooting the thing was so easy and inviting to do. Emi's green eyes looked at him with a piercing seriousness, the young man held firmly in her vision.

"Are you just poking it with the bayonet?"

She was just as serious when she asked that.
 
Terrence was surprised to find that hunting was a topic of interest to Emi.

"It was in a bent fashion?" Terrence reached upwards and stretched as the prisoner continued. "Yep. Sometimes we'll learn the habits of the target so we can lie in wait on it's usual route. Other times we crawl at an agonizingly slow pace. Like, one hand slides forward every thirty seconds." He had been confused by his father's way of hunting as well. However, the man's plans quickly showed their merit. He almost laughed out loud when the Neko suggested that they stab their targets. "No, animals can be very perceptive, we would never be able to get that close. You see, we have to get close to guarantee a hit. Sure, we could probably hit them at a distance, but we didn't like having 'probably' in our vocabulary when it came to hunting."
 
One of her catlike ears twitched as she laid on her bed, listening to him talk about the hows of hunting back at home.

"Wait, are you telling me you were hunting with just analog aim?" the Neko asked in surprise. Emi's chin stopped resting on the upturned palms of her hands as she pushed her upper half off the bed with both arms. Swinging her legs around, she was now sitting proper, cross legged on the cot. "I mean, you don't have a range finder, windage detector or projectile course indicator?" she asked him, green eyes narrowed. Emi had crossed her arms tightly across her chest, pushing her bust up in the process. Even when she looked uncomfortable with an idea, she, like all of her kind, looked good while doing it. "Hen-des," the young woman remarked in Yamatai-go.

'That's weird,' it meant.
 
"Wha-? Oh." Terrence scratched the back of his head awkwardly. "Uh, I'm not exactly rolling in money. That kind of cash is better spent on things useful for day-to-day life." Suddenly, it seemed like he was giving off the wrong impression about his family's financial situation. "That isn't to say we couldn't buy stuff like that, it's just-... Well, we aren't poor, but we know the value of money." Beepbeep, beepbeep. Terrence looked at his jockey, and groaned at what the time was. "I'm sorry Emi, but I gotta go. NSMC stuff, you know? I'll see you soon." "Or maybe she'll be gone by then... Shut up." The young marine stood up and approached the door at a relaxed pace, before remembering what the mischievous cat-women outside had done to him before. He seemed to be willing himself to leave, giving himself a little pep-talk and everything.
 
"Hey, boy," Emi's voice chimed in behind him. "Don't get buttmad about whether or not your family's poor," she told him, looking away, focusing on a little spot on the wall. "It's not like I care about that or anything. I just wanted to do 'this and that' for a bit." Whether or not it was a lie, the admission hung in the air for a moment before some knocking on the door started up. Sighing, she got up and opened the door, picking up a bag of items left outside. "You know, I wonder if the Captain of your ship really is just trying to make life harder on the Star Army Neko by giving us our own items, or if your Captain actually pities us and won't admit it," the white haired woman wondered. Turning her green eyes up at him, she spoke, "I'm guessing you really want to leave now, but I need to ask you something first."

Reaching inside the bag, she pulled out a paper box and opened it, revealing the same exact clothing she was wearing now. A white button up shirt, black skirt, and finally, a green tie which matched her eyes. "Now that I actually do have clothing, I'm a little curious; you do know we can go without anything to wear right? Just holograms?"
 
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Terrence tilted his head at that. He knew enough that avoiding eye-contact and focusing on a place in conversations was used to avoid being caught in a lie. (He learned that one from an old spy thriller that had existed a long time ago back to who knows when and where. People know who made it for some reason, some chick named Tam Clooney or Tom Cla-... Tom Claire? No, that's not right. Oh, parenthesis, sorry.) The colonist shrugged, about to turn around to leave when Emi asked that question... It was like she had come in like a wrecking ball on his hopes and dreams. "W-w-w-w-wha-wha-." He turned around immediately and began to walk out of the room. "I-I-I'm g-g-going to pr-pre-pretend you had clothes on and go my m-me-murr-merry little way!" And with that, he was off, running like his Drill Instructor and his mom were coming after him, both insisting that the DI was his new father.
 
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