Tachiko was delighted that Kazumi accepted her hug. The others were the matriarch's actual children; newly brought into the clan, she'd worried about her acceptance and standing among them, but that hug was one of the last moorings of her doubts giving way like the great Tokyo itself for the first time drifting from its dry dock. "Ooh, we should've hit the stand before we got in line... we'd probably only be a couple places back at most," she lamented, although the subsequent, demure giggle softened her lamentation considerably. She glanced back at the crêpe stand once more, briefly, before mentioning, "I've met her... recently even. She, well, I mean... you know. You probably saw it on SANDRA." Frowning a little with her lower lip tucked behind her front teeth, she became the sole spectator of another foot-shuffling contest as she averted her gaze downward, and away from her two fellow Shōi Kōhosei, Command Special Liaisons, classmates, shipmates, and clan-siblings. She'd been happy to see Hanako, of course, just as she was now, but the momentousness of the occasion complicated her emotions, and they churned in her stomach now that she reflected on her rescue, fully displacing the hunger that had been doing the same.
Unbeknownst to Tachiko, she was neither the only recent Motoyoshi adoptee, nor the only genealogical member of the now-absorbed Takeda tributary present. "I noticed him," Kuroko announced softly to Eidan even as she was still flushed and smirking smugly at the awkward tone of his compliments. That the handsome young man, in such a sharp uniform, so gracelessly deliver his undoubtedly meticulously-rehearsed opening lines was perhaps twice as charming as if he'd been effortlessly suave. The cold, alien mind behind her smirking, grey-eyed countenance appreciated the simultaneous blows that lead to her Pyrrhic victory in this battle: that she'd so rattled him he was so flustered, yet that same flustered awkwardness ensnared her, giving him an opening to the soft underbelly beneath her carapace. It was almost as if she was becoming the teenage girl that now served as the vessel for her consciousness.
"...wait, why did I just think I had a carapace?" Kuroko blinked, inclining her head. The smirk gave way to bemused introspection, and the entire scene faded as she looked inward. She didn't know she wasn't always that teenage Minkan, of course, any more than she knew why she looked so much like the Nekovalkyrja talking to the man who looked so much like Eidan, or why she couldn't help but feeling Hanako and company were people she knew as more than just a famous admiral she'd seen on the news and been taught about in class, and her crew. The distinct and uncomfortable feeling that someone has been keeping something from her had just taken root, writhing and pulsing and sharp-tipped like the tentacles that she sometimes woke from sleep surprised she did not possess.
