like cats and wolves

Seer's decorative vision for the barracks is a little bit too horse-in-the-hospital, Al will say despairingly when his best bud's not around, but toss a few more folks in there to mix it up with a tower of pizza boxes, and you'd hardly notice the generous portent of blood.

Hardly. But then, Seer's own curly-topped head is much more vivid, just like the centers of its eyes. Al's still catching up on all the imagining about the staring he always swore, somehow, he'd someday get to do.

(As if he hadn't done plenty of staring into the empty - say it ain't so - visor, alone in a hangar at night, stranger in a strange land, just waiting so softly for the world to change.)

Distracted. Sure, if you'd seen the truth of all universes swimming together as one, you'd probably be pretty prone to getting distracted. And Al will space out at the best of times, even when there isn't a galactic cataclysm on his brain.

So what's up, here, with the rest of the family? More than just a comfortable murmur of white noise. They've gotta be saying something, of that much Al is sure.

"Hey, don't rain on my parade!" Seren nudges Seer with a smile that betrays all possible vitriol (when do they ever have any? they don't). L's response to this is to expound upon the nature of things that shine and get hit on. Generally, it's unintelligible, but Al seems to catch just enough of it that his own brilliant blue eyes wobble, just the tiniest fraction.

These are the people, those mighty few, most apt to understand him, after all - Princess aside, and he has to admit that some of his rapport with her is mere pretense, by this point; a futile attempt to close a gap wide as Ibra Ravine, though the fault of no one in reality.

But this is reality. This is Mira's side of the rift, so beautifully, grandiosely weird.

Yeah, there's a forest, and a desert, and a grassland without traditional trees, but there's also a kinetic sand biome with things that are almost less like trees than the rock formations in the grassland, and then a pasture of lavapools in which for magma golems to graze, after that. All settled comparatively flat upon endless oceans.

It really is significantly less unapproachable when Al considers the fellow scavengers helping and making sense of all of that sort-of-surveyed wilderness, so like Earth and yet so...not.

Seer is...everything he finds in Ares and more: say friend, partner, brother - is that right? Maybe not (certainly not brother like his sister, departed from all definitions of blood), but Al's too tired for the figuring. Nonspecific is fine. Great, even. The love is in the learning, and the figuring, and the not even needing to, by the end of it all, for any and every reason.

The love is in the giant purple robot that kisses you goodnight, also. In case anybody forgot.

Seren is absolutely enchanted with humanity's whims and customs, if occasionally melancholy about the lack of an own race to belong to. Are there more star people out there? Could there be? Al's seen it all; he should really know, huh? And then L...L is a whim unaccustomed, straight up, and cir melancholy, in turn, is only for Seren.

What ties them all together, if only for tonight, is that they all love pizza as much a single Ma-non, put together, which is more than enough for Al on any a dark and rainy day.

What he's surmised about Seren is that they imbibe a steady diet of junk food, having neither any physical need for healthy foods nor any preconceived notions about the morality inherent in consuming only pizza and french fries and milkshakes, all the time.

They're not obnoxious with it, and they don't refuse to eat anything else, since they don't actually eat that much in general, but Al has to wonder at the fact that L hasn't also subscribed to this fadtangulous fashion of feeding oneself, in the pursuit of learning more and most about what humans love and have created.

Really, pizza is the pinnacle of human innovation. The Ma-non know it, the Nopon sort of mutually acknowledge, the Orphe observe, the Zarboggan marvel over the sheer gross quantities of grease - even Powell had treated it like a sort of religion of its own...

(Powell, a more gracious drill sergeant of the margherita and neapolitan realms than the prodigal hero, certainly.)

Wonders truly never would cease, here on Mira.

Al knows he's sappy. He's proud of it. He's the only human left living, and his weakness is his strength. He truly believes that. He can't be shaken.

If you wanna call love for your fellow humans (say, your fellow fellows, and weirdos and proto-Samaarians and all) a weakness, and Al's met many that do, well, it just about spells it out for you, doesn't it?

It's not an easy world, out here. Think how hard a guy's gotta fight just to get pepperoni pizza! And the fat distribution probably puts it into the realm of a completely different salume. Al senses a bit of inner trepidation about the possibility that the texture could be wildly different from what he's used to, accompanied by changes in the curls of the round, greasy pepperoni cups dotting the surface of the pies... He'll brave it, though. Somehow.

The other three don't have any metric for that at all, though, do they? Any mim could have a reprogrammed sensory system complete with olfactory and gustatory overhaul, such that they don't care what slop goes in their rations, they think it's delicious. Al sort of buys that from L anyway.

Not that they're fighting over the pizza, per se. There seems to be a minor slapfight erupting, perpetually in fits and starts, between Seren and Seer, which L keeps misapprehending and interpreting as a cue to...cup Seren's entire head in cir palm? What?

Al's just not even gonna go there. Not even gonna question it. They used to say on Earth that love is love. Well, this not-hero says that too, and actually believes it. One of his very favorite sayings!

"Everybody copacetic over here? We all buddy-buddy?"

He makes the announcement almost rhetorically, striding over to stand across from L at Seer's back and lay a gentle hand on Ares, just so as not to make it jump at his sudden presence.

(As if Ares would jump. He knows Al better than Al knows himself, and that's a promise.)

The heads of Seren and L, so unequally mounted, swivel behind mouthfuls of crust to lock focus upon Al, and then they both grin at the same time, with the same face-shaping crinkles, too. It's that uncanny synchrony that makes relationships between humans in mims and organic creatures so special. The same, of course, had applied when Seer wasn't Seer, just yet, floating coreless in a lost vendetta's mim.

"You are nervous, Alois," points out L. "We do not know how to see you so. Would you not enjoy one of these slices of heaven?"

Seren, of course, is just happy as long as there's no poppin' in the room with them, but if L means to say that ci's concerned about Al standing aside from the jubilant proceedings, then yeah, maybe there is a little bit of cringe missing from their family affair.

It's certainly allowable, though - why shouldn't someone be so happy they're completely taken aback, if the same can be said for sadness?

Overwhelmed. They should all be overwhelmed. It's a miracle Seren isn't, considering their journey from amnesiac to, most recently, potential pilot of the Ares Prime. Now, is it only a third-tier honor? Yes, but they accept it gladly, knowing that Seer and Al both compete equally for the title of one true pilot.

So what is it, then? Al's been uprooted and unhomed for far too long to be getting restless here in humanity's last idea of an American cross-cultural city. Pacing...c'mon, man, not the pacing!

He heaves himself down onto a couch and, by some strange turn of intuition, knows to hold up a hand (still gloved - sensory issues much?) into which Seer unceremoniously deposits a slice of pizza.

Ah, it's gone a little lukewarm... Al nearly opens his mouth to complain, but then thinks better of it. Seer got him the heckin' toppings to begin with, so if he makes a stink about pizza that he let get cold, he's really not painting a great reputation for Mira's only honorary BLADE with nowhere else to go.

(A human among a legion of humans who just aren't quite the same - stranger in a strange land redux, huh? He's gotta make his bed here, because he knows the Orphe aren't gonna take him.)

So Al opens his mouth, mechanically, and chews. Man, but garlic, peppers and broccoli can do amazing things, and not just in a stir fry. Just like he'd said: salty, cheesy, gooey, stringy, tangy, unctuous...

He's been around people that have best preferred he didn't go into big, involved explanations of the sensual qualities of food before. He's learned his lesson.

Won't stop him from thinkin' it, though.

With some sustenance in his mouth, sliding its way on down, Al finds the energy to tune back into Seren's conversation with L - if you can call it that. The gist is something like two beats of setup from the pint-sized Interceptor and an off-time rimshot from the Wanderer extraordinaire (and no, Al does not want to know what L has to say about rimshots).

"I know I'm not usually squeamish about indigen blood 'n' guts, but yeesh, I hate how the suids EXPLODE when you hit them. Like, if I've gotta kill an animal, can't it just be normal violent? Does it have to be, like, y'know, double violent?"

L nods in accord, slice folded inside out in a manner that would make any crass New Yorker Al had ever met instantly sick. "One cannot make a road pizza without scrambling a few legs..."

Really morbid. Nice, L, thanks. And Seren, too - yeah, that's right, we needed to be talking about exploding body parts at dinner. Mind inviting Yelv, next time?

Of course, Al's not really perturbed by any of this. He can't be! He loves them all too much to make any irritated, tetchy personal judgements about such habits. Yeah, they'll probably have words at some point, but maybe someone else can handle the translation to L. Seren'd probably love that.

"And if the body part explodes, right, then how is there anything left to eat?! You'd attack the shoulder if you wanted that cut of the meat, but then" - Seren begins to gesticulate wildly with their own bit of tightly-held crust - "Bam! Poof! Gone!"

An odd sensation at the periphery of his gaze has Al turned his neck more fully to the center of the conversation: L's additive emphasis is nuts-on for each arc of Seren's demonstration. It's...strikingly intellectual, can one say that much? Absolutely astounding how much ground they cover while saying nothing at all.

Maybe soon they'll start debating the denotations and connotations of pizza-face versus crater-face, and how it pertains to a nosebridge full of freckles and stars. Might be interesting, captivating, scintillating.

Seer, meanwhile, just shrugs. Xer slice is safe and secure on a paper plate, while xe pretends to sip at ginger beer. "Gotta do what you gotta do, right? Not like I could ever tell my buddy here no!"

Al can feel his cheeks heat up, and he's pretty sure it's not because they're full of still-piping-hot tomato sauce (cheese is a great insulator, apparently). And here he'd thought he was the forward one. Too quick for me, Ares, always. We don't even need words, to know.

Strange bedfellows. Oh yes. Judging by Seren's easy acclimation to the life of a human, the need for sleep and nighttime comfort had been programmed into the firmware, so to speak - and it makes enough sense, unless you're trying to consider that some of the soldiers and statesmen being loaded onto these things might have more or less trauma than any other; might respond differently, to the rhythms of the world.

Al's really not sure what he'd do, who he'd be, if it were he that'd been transplanted into a mim. He's glad, real glad, not to have to think about it. Of course, he does have to think about it, but only in the sense that it's worthy of ultimate consideration. It's important, like few things once thought crucial still are.

Seer? Well, Seer knows how to be human the same way Al had and has always been figuring it out. Obviously. Just one more crazy and wonderful thing they share.

Crazy. Wonderful. Sharing. Caring.

Just a few of the endlessly loving ways Alois Bernholt could best describe the company he now keeps, wilder than the skies of Earth even on the ground inside a barricade safe away from exploding pigs and parasites.

(Sure, sure, maybe he's lined himself up some terrible shots of comeuppance, some direct from Vandham and some by way of Kato, but man oh man, what a way to go.)

please pardon starchart "brother" it's spirk th'y'la "friend, brother, lover" you'll see when we get to this simple feeling