ic contact;

[psycholawgy]

You've reached Athena Cykes. I'm currently unavailable, but leave a message and I'll get back to you pronto. Danke! (voice/call → text → video → action)

Comments

[psycholawgy]

Nah, I'm actually at the medical facility right now. :) Room 606.
No macarons here, but I do have chocolate-coated biscuits.

[zerotohiro]

...close enough. I'll take them. I'll see you soon!

[And true to his word it takes roughly fifteen minutes for him to book it from where he was at to head for the medical facility. He comes rolling up to room 606 wheeling behind a little red suitcase and hoodie zipped up.] Athena?

[psycholawgy]

[ with a push of a button, the door to 606 slides open, revealing athena's little clinic. it's a cozy place with a lot of couches and bookshelves - kind of like what you'd normally see in a living room. athena's seated on a wheelie chair, but she gets up and heads towards the door to welcome her guest. ]

Hey there, Hiro. Need help?

[ that thing with you seems pretty heavy! ]

[zerotohiro]

[It's not a bad little place. He's actually a little curious about what books she has lying around and he has a lot of questions suddenly but...those can wait. He tugs on the suitcase again but shakes his head, grinning even as she gets up and walks toward him.]

I got it. I've been lugging him around for most of the morning. There's a reason he's on wheels. [He pauses then.] I didn't realize you meant you have an actual office.

[psycholawgy]

[ if hiro's fine, then she'll go serve him some tea and the biscuits she mentioned! the tea is some fruity black tea - tastes like berries. ]

Neat, huh? If I didn't become a lawyer, this is what I'd be totally doing full-time.

[zerotohiro]

Which is what, exactly? Intimidating people with giant books? [While Athena's doing that, he's parking his suitcase next to one of the couches and wandering to examine the spines of the books. He'll claim his tea and biscuits in a bit.]

[psycholawgy]

[ she shoots him a look before crumpling a piece of paper and throwing it his way. ]

A psychotherapist, silly!

[zerotohiro]

[Guess who's just going to bounce the paper ball off of his hair and then juggle it with his knees as though it were a real soccer ball? THIS GUY. Eventually he stops though.]

I didn't think you were actually serious when you told me you were a psychologist. [She'd mentioned it a while ago but. It's Athena.]

[psycholawgy]

[ ah... ]

What?! I'm always serious!

[ okay, that's a lie, but she's always serious when it comes to psychology! ]

[zerotohiro]

Always? [Athena plz. But he wanders over because the tea smells delicious and he's going to make himself comfortable on a couch.] Jury's still out on that one. How secure is your office, by the way? Patient confidentiality and all that.

[psycholawgy]

No cameras, [ except the ones in their eyes, of course. but she refrains from making a comment on that. ] I guess the only person who'd spill anything would be me, if... you know, I wanted to lose my job.

And don't forget Widget!

[ ah... if any secrets were to be broadcasted, widget would be the first to spill the beans. ]

[zerotohiro]

[He grins a little.] How could I forget Widget? But...that's good to know. You might wanna sit down. There's a lot of stuff going on I think you should probably know.

[psycholawgy]

[ YOU COME INTO MY OFFICE AND TELL ME WHAT TO DO—no, but athena sits down, immediately putting on a serious expression. even during her trials, she has the gall to make funny comments, but it's just so different when it's here in cerealia. what's serious is actually serious—and she has to do her part, too.

so, yeah, no wisecracks from her for now. ]

Alright. I'm listening.

[zerotohiro]

So...we've got a lot to cover. Do you want to hear about the stuff we found out about the library books first, or what Tadashi and I found in the CERES tower a little over a week ago?

[psycholawgy]

What?! You went into the tower?

No fair!

[ WIDGET STOP TALKING PLS THIS IS SERIOUS. ]

What did you find?

[zerotohiro]

Nothing as interesting as what we found the first time, but just as weird. [He's going to dig into his bag he brought with him and fish out a notebook and pen, quickly sketching something from memory.] Six of us went in but we all got separated. Katsura, Hinata and Celty went to one part of the tower and Hiccup came with me and Tadashi. Hiccup ended up going down in an elevator and Tadashi and I went up and found this really old terminal. So we turned it on to see if we could get a transmission going.

[Here he turns the page to her, showing her almost an identical drawing of the masked alien.] Does this guy mean anything to you?

[psycholawgy]

[ athena squints her eyes and bends forward to get a better look, but it doesn't register. ]

I've never seen him before. [ she makes a face. ] Creepy, though.

Did you meet him?

[zerotohiro]

I'm pretty sure "meet" is too strong of a word. It's more like he saw us, showed us a few letters, disappeared, came back when we started the transmission again and then just...[He quiets.] ...it made this really awful sound. Like. Imagine like a dinosaur being run over by a train and the train colliding into another train on the tracks and metal twisting and everything falling apart in a huge inferno. It kinda sounded like that.

Tadashi and I can't figure out where it came from. I was hoping maybe you might have an idea since you've been here so long.

[psycholawgy]

[ hiro, you are so descriptive. ]

Sorry, I've never seen him or heard of anything like it before.

... This might be something new.

[zerotohiro]

[He has an active imagination, what do you want from him.]

He also gave us four letters that ended up spelling out bare. I've been trying to figure it out for days and I've got nothing. [A beat.] I also kinda wanted to ask your opinion on asking a certain possibly-sometimes-friendly representative of CERES. I don't know if I trust Mosley, but would it be a bad idea to ask him?

[psycholawgy]

[ she crosses both her arms and legs as she thinks, eyes focused on her own teacup. ]

He's so unpredictable, but it's worth a shot. I mean, some people didn't notice it, but he did save us when we were in the jungle. [ or in her case, the volcano. ] If you present yourself in a nice way, he might give you the answers you need.

If you're hostile to him straight away, he'll cut your words down easily and won't give you what you need.

[zerotohiro]

I remember. He came up to the mountain to get all of us, too. I've tried being nice to him but...y'know. [Hiro's version of nice isn't always nice, basically.]

But he rescued me and Korra the first time we were in the tower. I think he knows more than he's telling us and I think he might even want to help us in some cases. But I haven't been here since the start of Bellona's reign as CEO so I'm not sure if it's a good idea to enlist his help.

[psycholawgy]

Should I try asking him for help?

[ she doesn't want to brag or anything, but she and mosley are almost friends. so she thinks, anyway. ]

[zerotohiro]

Only if you think you could do it without alerting his boss and without you getting in trouble. Do you really think he'd do that? I...don't want to say I trust him, but I don't exactly distrust him either. That's where I'm kinda stuck.

[psycholawgy]

[ the good thing about athena is that when she's not being overly emotional, she knows exactly how to word things properly to get what she wants. ]

I could always just ask him smaller questions first, like why he saved us in the jungle. If his answer's good enough, I can move on with asking about the thing you saw.