The light on Matoi's scar had grown as they drove in to Nigeria, and while Mia & Samuel searched with her, the otaku couple went out to a Lagos cafe. Yuruko set her laptop on the table as they sat down, disintegrating the armor she'd formed over the keyboard.
"Least the internet's better here." she muttered and started typing.
"Yeah, but Matoi probably hates us now." mumbled Serena, $30 richer than yesterday.
Yuruko laughed. It was her habit to troll online, and given she was a student, some of it she did in real life as well. She felt Matoi had more than opened herself up to it given her opinion of Yuruko's hobbies.
Serena read off the screen as Yuruko closed her eyes. "Parker-Lang hypothesis."
"…resistance of FNI fragments and mitochondrial genes to free radical damage is due to Vol-3 proteins that allow normal function to continue even when parts of the colony are damages by age-related degeneration. Except it's total bullshit and damage theory makes way more sense.
Serena nodded, utterly clueless. "That's right. Um, what difficulties do researchers face in creating artificial Volgari proteins?"
"Actual Volgari proteins don't denature at any temperature and they're not composed of the twenty amino acids. They convert lysine into xenosine, but we don't know the actual process how it does that. And even hosts like Luna have their own different cycle, most likely."
"Why were hosts originally quarantined under the assumption they were radioactive?"
"Initial tests showed that they had twenty times the level of lethal radiation in their bodies. Until they realized it was only concentrated in the heart."
"Why doesn't it harm hosts or… um, Viscera…?"
"Because they have multiple DNA repair mechanisms in their genome. Compared to non-hosts, um…"
Yuruko held her breath as she heard the cafe's door open. She squeezed Serena's hand.
"It's okay." whispered Serena. "They're not coming near us."
For all the time she'd known Yuruko, she was always nervous about something; recently it was the safety of her laptop. Serena sometimes worried she had developed it in to a need to feel anxious - a constant she refused to go to therapy for.
"Do you want to keep going?"
"…um, repeat it."
"Why doesn't radiation harm hosts?"
"Hosts can repair their DNA through single-strand annealing or homologous recombination. It's why we don't develop cancer and we can break Vijg's 115-year limit."
A waiter came up to them. Serena gave one order and he walked away. "Um, you don't want anything, right?"
Yuruko shook her head. "No, I just - I don't want to try anything new. I actually just want to go home, but… Having to fucking deal with mosquitoes, everywhere smells so fucking bad, our air conditioning barely works, riding in that stupid Jeep every day, the internet sucks and everybody looks at us like we're fucking freaks, just like on campus, and…" (Streams of fog drew 'I love you.' on her arm and she smiled a little.) "I love you too."
Serena kissed Yuruko's cheek. It was normally Yuruko's best trait that she never concealed her emotions, but she still hoped she could keep Yuruko's fuse dimmed until they got back home. The past few months had been trimming it down to the scalp.
"At least we have Blackburn-food."
"At least we have Blackburn-food." muttered Yuruko. She saw another table glaring at them and frowned.
"Just ignore them." mumbled Serena.
"Nah." Yuruko held her hand out and a revolver formed. They looked away and Serena laughed. "Ugh. Probably some religious dipshits."
She could not understand the persistence of religion in a world with Revenants, and felt that one day humanity would pass a threshold of intelligence by which all that is holy would become profaned, and we would dispense with all gods humans debase and subject themselves to.
But religion and intelligence are separate matters, as shown with Marisa and her sister Penelope. It seems that despite scientific progress in evolutionary biology and chemistry having disproven creationism & intelligent design, religion remains one of the few ways to respond to the world's injustice and cruelty. It was easy for scientific knowledge to drive God out of Heaven; harder is finding out why he still remains on Earth.
Yuruko shook her head and started typing. Funny how President Swarm could kill another student and get away with it, but she'd likely be the first to bitch if they disturbed anybody in precious Nigeria. "Whatever. I'm glad the rest of Timepact gets to visit Japan and Mia takes us to fucking Nigeria."
'Here we go.' thought Serena.
"Like we already don't get enough people looking at us like we're freak from those sandpaper-pussied dykes on campus. God, ever notice how much they bitch about getting sexually harassed, too? Half of them look like fucking Andrea Dworkin, so what guy would even want to fuck them?"
"Let's keep studying." nodded Serena. "Um, what are the principle allotropes of elemental Visson?"
"B8 octahedra." muttered Yuruko.
These rants never did affect her thinking much: she simply slid them naturally into her cadence. And while she knew that Mia did not fit the stereotype that she casually set upon the group, she felt distrustful of her: she did not interact with her much.
This latest altercation seemed to prove it, even though rationally it did not. As you know, Mia would not have cared about the lives of a few homophobes. Yet this did not prevent it from becoming stuck to Yuruko's mind like Velcro; she could occasionally pull some of it off, yet its tiny hooks lingered in her mind.
It was the same whenever she was near the coastline, for she would think of that seashell again. She would wonder where its waves had originated. Yes, they were caused by wind, which were caused by the uneven heat of the sun against the earth, but the further back she explored the origin of natural phenomena, the more she had come across questions only answerable by 'because'; at least it seemed to her. It gnawed at her need for things to have a logical explanation, for things to not simply be. It was a similar mindset she continually tried to employ with Tammy, if by reaching back across her archipelagos of memory she might find her origin off her own level shores.
But to do so, she felt she needed to examine her father's role in her life.
That he was so often away from home made the love Yuruko had for him seem purer; that it was a chosen love, rather than one that had emerged simply from time. No one thing deserves love or respect: to say otherwise would be to diminish both. Yet she often could not win with her parents, for the more she shone love on her father the more Tammy withdrew from her, and would guilt her for this seemingly irrational mismatch.
His wife had wanted a girl, and himself a boy: only one was satisfied with Yuruko.
He often worked late and long hours at his job at Pfizer. He loved Yuruko, and his behavior with her was often an attempt to compensate for his own lingering feeling that he himself had not been appreciated as a child. He had been put up for adoption as a baby, and had been raised in the foster care system until he was adopted at 7 years old. If she was still awake, he would often take her out onto the patio and talk to her without Tammy involved.
"Are those girls still bothering you?"
"Not since I dropped those guns in their lockers."
"I remember. We had to have a whole conference over that. Amazing what blueprints you can find on the internet."
"Yeah, and I said sorry, or whatever, but what else was I supposed to do, you know? I mean, even all the other host girls in my class were pissed at me, like those bitches didn't do anything to me first?"
"Language."
"Sorry."
He sometimes wondered if this was part of her Revenant, too; there was no guide to parent a host. "…well, Yuruko. They didn't see what they did to you before. I don't want you antagonizing anyone in your own class, and especially not any other hosts. But, you know, I had a few bullies when I was younger. Don't hurt them, Yuruko, but it's alright if... well, I shouldn't be teaching you this. But it's not wrong to threaten them to get them to stop if a teacher won't listen. Most bullies like that are all fleet. But I never want you to hurt or hit them. Nothing like what you did with your mother. Alright?"
"I won't, dad."
"Alright. Now, who's this girl I hear you brought over the other day?"
"She's just somebody from my anime club."
"Oh, the cartoons. Do you like her?"
"Yeah, maybe. I don't know if I really trust her enough to date, though. I just get a bad feeling from her." Yuruko twisted her fingers. At this young age, her autism had been more pronounced: it was only now was she learning to mask it. "Dad, can I ask you a question?"
"Yes."
"Why do you stay with her? Tammy. You can do better than that. I don't know, she's just such a *bitch*. Sorry, language."
He did not laugh. "…well, Yuruko. Sometimes people stay in unfavorable situations not necessarily because they enjoy being in them, but because they're afraid of the alternative. So, they almost grow to feel safe in them, not because of what it is but because what it isn't. Does that make sense?"
Yuruko nodded, although she did not really understand. His voice seemed to emanate from a far on place as he discussed when they could next go to the zoo or the aquarium. There he would teach her the different traits of insects, ones that even now, she could recall because it reminded her of his love.
And this remembrance would continue, until it would simply *snap* and end. It was a quick end she also felt her involvement in the Royal Four would need to be, for she knew she could not keep studying Phantasmology under such a schedule.