Nailing Down the Primum Mobile

"Estelle is strangely elusive," a ragged Uta mumbles. Bags under her eyes, wearing a menu-crafted cookie-cutter MMORPG-style nurse's uniform instead of Gwen's usual custom creations, Uta leads the way through the Land of Eas. One thing, at least, is that her hygiene is maniacal, compatibly with the nature of her Strange Mood.

"When she wishes upon a star- wait, no, that's from a movie. I think," she says, with a frown. "I mean, when she focuses on her stellar endeavours, there's no finding her. At least I think it's her stellar endeavours. It might just be that I'm bad at Tracking," she mumbles. "In general, that is. I'm usually pretty good at finding Jazz, so I think we'll go the indirect route and hand things over to Jazz. Jazz seems to be good at finding Estelle." Uta turns around, "It'll be a relay of reliability. A relayability?", she frowns again, puzzled.

Under normal circumstances, Kita does not leave the Isle of Beginnings. The young woman's ties are firmly set with Scale Emblem and more closely, Tolbana. However, it seems that someone had suggested that she might find inspiration for her own current project by exploring the other cultures of the world. For someone acting under a strange mood... anything can be an excuse to further those goals.

"Do you think stars are an appropriate symbol for a nation?" There she goes, trying to relate everything back to her current project, her pen scratching in a sketchbook as she walks beside Uta, not even bothering to look up at where she is going. "I don't know that it suits King Gilgamesh, but... maybe." Kita is dressed very differently than her regular attire, with a pair of slacks and a button-front shirt. Even her hair is tucked under a cap that gives her a more boyish appearance. It's easier than trying to maintain the makeup and glamour that she normally portrays.

Then, her mind snapping back to the moment, she asks, "Oh, right. Yes, I'm sure Jazz is around here somewhere." Pushing her glasses up on her nose, she looks to Uta. "I'm not really familiar with this place but... is there anywhere that would normally appeal to them?"

"Stars are an extremely common symbol in flags," Uta replies. "From the five-pointed star in the center like Vietnam to the five-pointed star on the canton like Chile, to multiple stars like the United States, or the European Union, or the People's Republic of China... if one thinks about it, the Hinomaru of Japan is technically a star. Constellations are common too! The Southern cross appears in both the flags of Brazil and Australia..."

She gives Kita's other question the a little thought. "I do not know king Gilgamesh either. Although it would be nice to incorporate some sybolism involving the foundation of the kingdom. The stars of that night would be a possibility, but I was also thinking a cup of coffee. Or cake. Or a hand on a cash register."

It probably shows that Uta has no Artisany skill.

"If you want to find Jazz, think of the place you'd most likely go to enjoy beauty and, most importantly, be left alone," Uta promptly replies to the last question. "I usually go in the general direction of those places, mostly not on purpose, and then wander around aimlessly. One's bound to stumble on her. Oh, wait-" She wanders off to the side of the road, to pick some flowers look almost, but not completely, like dandelions. "I have never seen this one. I'll have to ask a herbologist what its effects are." She swipes her menu open. "Or just boil it and drink some if I dont' find a herbologist in time. There's no time to wait!"

"Hmm." Kita catches her lower lip between her teeth, just around the place where she has that lingering pink scar that is likely from her real-world body scan. "I want to represent the fact that those cast out from all over Yamato have come together within Uruk. Maybe a star at the central heart of an silhouette of King Gilgamesh's companion..." The rest of the information Uta offers definitely goes in one ear and out the other.

"No no, he's not that kind of King." She waves a hand, pencil still held between her fingers. "At least I have the colors down, and I have Gwen looking for materials."

And there goes Uta picking at flowers and Kita comes back to reality again, "You're right, that probably is where we'd find Jazz. It makes me feel a bit bad that I haven't checked in on them in a while, but... Aincrad keeps me busy." The Imp tugs the cap down a bit, but it gets stuck on the horns that stick out from her bangs. She seems to remember, then, that she is no longer human.

"So... what exactly are you doing? I mean, I get the flower thing, but why are you drinking them?"

In the distance. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, its on the ground and not going that fast. Haru is running in, arms waving heavily from side to side in the first ever Noodle Run. "Uta," he pants putting a hand out to her. Deep breaths. "Wait," pant.

He goes into his inventory and takes out a handful of cookies. Haru replays a similar antic earlier this month and goes to stuff them into her mouth. "You need. To eat." Pant pant. At least he cares about his friend's well being. While stuffing food in Uta's mouth he notes, "Hello. There." The topic is great, too. He was just petitioning signet rings for Gil, or petitioning interest in them.

"Oh, I'm working on mffglghmmm mfmfmgllfgm pfmfpgmmm," Uta explains the moment cookies are stuffed into her mouth. She goes on pointing at her hand and gesticulating, occasionally miming something while chewing and talking at the same moment, until she swallows just as she's miming... puffing from a cigarette?

"...might get the wrong idea if I smoked it. In any case, the final goal, as I was saying, is to find a way to alleviate the pain of the Landers." She sighs and frowns. "I cannot do much for less physical types of pain..." Her gaze is lost in the distance for a moment, as she scans the area for signs of Jazz, "...but for everything else, there's anesthetic." A pause. "Well, as soon as I perfect it."

After this long, long, LONG talk, she spins abruptly. "Haru?! What are you doing here?!"

Goldenblade is here, in the vicinity of Eas, where some of her construction crew have left her so they can get on with the planned work without her hovering and trying to do the actual work, which they've been brought on to do. Her job is planning, and she ought to stick with planning, doing is their job. The plan was, they'll need further inputs about the time she finds her way back, but GB, obsessed with the plan, is just hanging around working on the plans in her head. She's currently laying back in a field of flowers doing this until Noodle-Running-though-the-tall-grass Haru steps on her gut, and she ooofs and groggily sits up. "It's got to be two point seven meters diamaeter, you fools!" she shouts, giving her crew, much too far away to hear, advice on something she imagined they did.

It's true that Jazz has been most recently sighted in Eas, assisting Wake. It's an easy enough thing to find out, right? So here's a couple people looking for her.

"You know," she says, "You can always chim me, Uta, but I suppose that'd take away the surprise." Not that she's always *responsive* to chims, but she still has to point it out casually more than anything else. The ruckus, the Uta-ing, and more had drawn her attention and she'd actually been coming up behind them at this point, padding along casually with a knuckle to one eye to blot out sleep she didn't get.

Even in her distracted state, Kita isn't the sort of person to completely miss someone racing towards her companion and all but force-feeding cookies down the Spriggan's throat. Her eyes widen with a look of surprise and shock. "I think she needs to breathe more than she needs to eat." Kita admonishes.

Spotting Goldenblade due to her outburst, the Imp adds, "And you should probably watch where you're going." Says the one that has barely been looking up from her sketchbook until these last few moments.

Then, an uncertain expression passes her features, "That reminds me, I wonder when the last time I ate was." She looks around, as if only now realizing that Jurou isn't there. "Huh, I guess I'll ask Jurou about it later. I wonder where she got off to." More likely, Kita wandered off and may very well have a concerned Salamander looking for her.

Then, at a familiar voice, she looks up, "Oh, hey. Uta, look, we found Jazz." Then, as if immediately drawn back to her own thoughts, "Hey Jazz, what do you think about stars as part of a national symbol?" There she goes!

Haru's hands are on his knees, face red. Finally he can breathe. He doesn't regret not having any physical vitality for the endurance runs since he can move 'fast' when he needs to. He does regret having enough air to respond to Uta, looking at her from his bent over position like a panting doggo. "Just. Got. Here." He takes a cookie out of his inventory and noms on it himself as he stands up. There is wisdom in Kita's mention of oxygen being an important part of healthy living and thus he nods once. Twice. Bobbleheads for a moment.

Wordlessly Haru goes for Kita's hand and puts a half of dozen cookie's in it like he is leading a humanitarian effort for 'people who dont eat'. "Eat. Food," he finally says, gulping down the last bit of air to speak normally. Like a dog that caught a squirrel, he turns to Goldenblade. "Gee Bee. When is the last time you ate?" They are everywhere. Weird Mood zombies. They will be handled with the cookie cannon. Jazu got sleep it seems. She is safe from the Weird Virus. FOR NOW.

"We have chims!?", Uta exclaims in shock. Shocked Utachu face.

She flicks through her menu, "Uh, we do. I had completely forgotten about those."

"No, no, actually ,that's a great idea!", Uta points at Kita. She flicks through her menu a little longer, and materializes a syringe, which she promptly uses to inject herself in the arm. "Quick, stuff my face with cookies again. Let's see how preparation #299 fares under conditions of oxygen deprivation!"

"Jazz! We found you! Way to go, us!", Uta exclaims, as cheerful as a robot finding a kitten. "Now, we had a thing we wanted to ask!" She frowns. She turns to Haru looking for a response, but all she sees is panting doggo. "You out of cookies?" She asks, with concern. "Should I provide you with cookies? Problem is, I don't think I have any cookies with me. Maybe,"

As Goldenblade bolts up, Uta looks at her. Then at her syringe. Then at Goldenblade. Syringe again. She pinches the sides of the barrel to assess its size.

"I think that would be -far- too much anesthetic, Paula."

And finally, back to Kita it is. Then to Jazz. Kita. Jazz. "Jazz! We found you! Way to go, us!", she exclaims again, as if it was the first time, wings fluttering in excitement.

After this demonstration of how terrible she'd be at poker, the Spriggan turns to Kita again and asks, "...ok, we've found her. What do we do now?"

In Haru's defense, Goldenblade was in a small hollow in the grassy ground, and would have been quite hard to spot for someone /not/ running headlong toward Uta. She is now conscientiously filling in the hollow, she has something that looks a bit like a monocle, possibly of the sci-fi villian snaps-over-eye variety, though it looks quite complicated as the hollow she'd been laying in slowly fills in.

When Haru turns on her and demands when she last ate, she replies, "What business is that of yours? Kids today, good grief!" What that means is, she has /no/ idea, but she's not going to admit it. Though judging from her stinky debuff showing up next to her hungry debuff, the last time she ate was probably the last time she bathed, a couple days ago. She's slowly catching up to events, though, and says to Haru, "You look more like you need air than she does," and pulls a small metal flask from her inventory. The adventurers who have run with Goldenblade will recognize the Oxygen Bottle. She advances on Haru with it. "Short of breath? This'll fix you right up." Uta is talking to Paula, the actual name she has, but only Uta ever uses it, and in her own mood, she's forgotten Paula is her. So, Uta must be addressing someone else. Problem solved, she will attempt to apply oxygen to Haru while he applies cookies to her.

Jazz's expression is growing increasingly skeptical. She's studying each person present in turn, carefully, using the inspect command. Just in case.

Slowly, her eyes turn back to Kita and Uta and the latter drives the undine to place a pair of fingers on the bridge of her nose and squeeze for a long moment of longer-suffering sigh.

"It's good to see you too, Uta," she tells her. Kita's question sneaks her from her internal screaming, however, and she instead chooses to ask a simpler question, "Who's flag?" she asks.

With one hand occupied by her pencil and the other by her sketchbook, Kita suddenly has cookies shoved at her. She ends up having to use her book as a table, balancing the half-dozen cookies that Haru has provided, looking both surprised and a little concerned. "Thank you?" She sounds a bit uncertain. "I promise, Jurou makes sure that I eat when my brain is ..." She motions around her head and whistles. Jurou isn't here, though.

The cookies, however, are in her way. So Kita starts to eat one, using a spare finger to swipe through her memories to stow some of the others into her inventory. She smirks a little at Goldenblade's comments, "See, that's what happens when you aren't paying attention. You rouse the wrath of the elderly." Her tail twitches behind her.

Uta's question draws Kita's attention back around. "It was the thing for Estelle. We were going to give it to Jazz since she has a better chance of running into her than either of us." Then, with Jazz asking her directly, the Imp explains, "King Gilgamesh. He recently stepped up to create the Realm of Uruk as a true Kingdom in Yamato. Since his kingdom has become home to many of those displaced from Ezzo, I wanted to try to capture the feeling of the Kingdom and what it means to people in a national flag."

"I'll let you know that, in this world, I am a qualified healer!", Uta snaps back at Goldenblade, pointing at herself with a thumb. And then hesitates. "...does having the Pharmacy skill alone make me qualified?", she asks, with more than a hint of worry. "...oh goodness, am I an unqualified healer? Will I be kicked out of the clinic of Tolbana?" More panic as her hands reach to her face. "Would that make me a disqualified healer?"

Luckily, Uta's attention span is squirrel, so she's soon back to her cheerful self when addressing Jazuhanzu. "You should have been there, Jazz!", Uta joins in excitedly after Kita's mention of the foundation of the Realm of Uruk. "It was amazing! Mizuki was experimenting with cutting herself with a knife, so I asked her if I could inject her with experimental drugs! We had the best time ever!", Uta rattles out, all ecstatic. She then looks away and taps her chin. "Something else happened, but at the moment the details escape me. Hard to focus on such secondary things."

She snaps her fingers, "Right! Oxygen deprivation! Haru! Cookies! 50 cc! Stat!" A pause. "Where by 'cc' I mean Chocolate Chip. Not cubic centimeters." More pause. "We don't have chocolate, do we? Fine, I'll take whatever."

Uta finally finds the energy to briefly focus on Kita. "I'd wager we're all resonating with the Primordial Song. I would medically inspect us to make sure, but I think the quickest way would be to sing the Primordial Song and see if we all intensify our obsession."

After some more obsessing about the song, Uta turns towards Jazz. "What was that about Estell- Right, the map! See, we passed through a place which was designated as 'Remnants of the Old World.' It looked like a frozen version of Shibuya. The Shibuya from Earth that is, not the one in Eastal," Uta gesticulates. "Skyscrapers and all. And a starry sky." Uta goes into a bit more detail about what they learnt about these Remnants of the Old world.

Goldenblade is seventy five, in real life, and has no issue with being called elderly, which is a lot more respectful than what she called the old baggages in her own youth. She does manage to get the oxygen bottle's built-on breathing over Haru's face, and the oxygen-rich air causes his stamina bar to practically leap back to full. Alas, it didn't have far to go. "You need to get more exercise, son," she says to him.

Uta is considered for unqualified healing, which is certainly what Goldenblade is doing, but she seems to have plenty of air, so Goldenblade just watches and listens. "Actual Shibuya?" she asks. "So, you found a way out and you came back here?"

"Wait, what? Like Sh--," Jazz stops dead to listen to the tale, perking up. Her eyes are wide and almost luminous in their intensity. Once it's finished, she's nodding slowly. "That... makes sense," she muses, "given what we saw on Tsushima and everything, yes." She lays a finger on her chin and then blinks slowly before letting out a breath she didn't realize she was holding. Tentacles twitch and then so do the gill slits on her neck. A flash of lavender ripples down the scales and markings on the side of her face. "Hm," she murmurs.

"The best time ever. I should like to see that eventually," she adds, and then to Kita she turns and muses to her.

"It's not our world's ancient Gilgamesh or Uruk, but the symbol of Uruk itself in ancient cuneform was a kind of star, so I'd be fine with it... but ... "

One gets the sense she's not done, even as she's drifting off into thought. She has Thoughts.

Uta's description of events has Kita staring in her direction briefly, her hand making an absent motion over her sleeve and glove covered arm. "You know, you could phrase it so it doesn't sound like you're a raging loon encouraging people to drug abuse and self-harm. Just a thought."

Testing the theory of just what they might be resonating with is met with a shake of the head, causing Kita's white bangs to shift from underneath the cap she is wearing, "Please don't. I'm having enough trouble doing anything other than focusing on this design." Her pencil slaps the page. "I just can't seem to get the right emotional impact and it's driving me nuts as it is."

Then Uta mentions the occurance beneath Carmina Gadelica and Kita nods enthusiastically, "Right. I managed a drawing of the star pattern. Of course, I'm not particularly gifted in astronomy so it's all relative to what I observed." She digs into her things and pulls out a copy of the star map that she had made. It... is likely not mathematically accurate, but it at least has everything /artistically/ where it should be with some embellishments for brighter or weaker lights in the sky.

"I don't think it was the real Shibuya. I mean, when was the last time any of us were there and actually were able to see stars? The light polution there is ridiculous." Kita explains, then shakes her head. "Besides, it was kind of empty and eerie and felt like a still life painting of what the place should be."

Then Jazz has to trail off and Kita seizes on it, "But...? If you have ideas, I need to hear them."

"Of course not!", Uta exclaims at Goldenblade. "I had experiments waiting back at-"

Silence.

Uta stares at Goldenblade. Jaw drop. Close mouth. Jaw drop. Close mouth.

"The... the thought did not occur," she mumbles. Then frowns. "Wait, no, uh. It did... did occur to someone!", she says, as she begins to rub her temples, with her left hand doing a far worse job at it than the other. "Something about... avatars? We still looking like this, so we can't possibly have -been- back?" She squints harder. "Also something about... it possibly being dangerous. Not lingering just in case. Lost Grounds? Something about King Gilgamesh not being sure if the area was like the Lost Grounds. Something about how we should not be lingering."

Kita's comment about her work has Uta reply, "Kita," she says, softly, trying to look at the Imp in the eyes, but as much respect and consideration as possible. "You shouldn't be so harsh on yourself about not having completed your work yet. It's nothing to go nuts over. You'll get there, eventually." Yet, as Kita's other, earlier words seem to hit, Uta goes silent and pull back a little. "Wait a minute! I... I don't sound like I'm encouraging drug abuse!", she stutters. Then, her left arm falls to her side. "Oh, uh, it fell asleep," she says, poking at it. Limp. She spins in place a couple of times, and the arm just follows around, as if lifeless. "Right! It's the injection from earlier! Haru, where are the cookies? I gotta test this!"

And soon, her right arm follows the same fate. "Oh, dang. Not another excessive dosage! Et tu, dominant arm!" She huffs, hanging her head. "I can't seem to get the concentration right! It's driving me -nuts-!"

Goldenblade hrms at the star pattern in Shibuya in Kita's drawing, nodding about the light pollution in Shibuya, but she wonders, "You know. The stars over Shibuya are basically the same as the stars anywhere else in Japan, so that much isn't unique." She peers at Uta as she explains, finally, why they didn't just go home, which corroborates what Kita is saying. "So, it wasn't home, it just looked that way? What an odd thing for game designers to build." She rubs her chin, then peers at Uta, whose arms now are a match for Haru's.

"The stars are the stars. Same as earth's," agrees Jazz, "in so far as anyone can tell." She stares at Uta for a long moment, working through what she's heard before she lets out another dismayed sound. It's adorable anyway.

"I missed it," she mutters, irritable.

Then to Kita, she explains, "... The kingdom represents the first dividing line between who we were and who we were now. It's where everything began. More than that, like the epic of Gilgamesh before it, the kingdom represents the line between life and death. It contains our potential to enact change but also for long-life. It is the door through which we walked here. Your flag should have a doorway on it, and on one side should sit the bull and on the other the snake, which sat beside Gilgamesh himself in artistic depictions of him in legend." She considers a moment longer,, tapping a finger against her chin, and then quotes, "You will never find the eternal life that you seek. When the gods created mankind, they also created death, and they held back eternal life for themselves alone. Humans are born, they live, then they die, this is the order that the gods have decreed," she quotes. "And yet now we sit outside that paradigm. We would due well to remember the lesson that Gilgamesh learned in the end."

As someone who had been present at the founding of the Realm of Uruk, the fact that they had all still been in their Avatar forms had gone completely unnoticed until Uta pointed it out just now. "Uta is right. I mean, this is a body-scan avatar, scars and all, but I still had horns, wings and a tail. So we couldn't have been back in the real world." Though she had already determined this by other means.

Kita meets Uta's eyes, and her comment /might/ have had an impact if it didn't directly lead into the Spriggan seeming to travel down a very similar line of thinking. Strange Moods sometimes have that hypocritical and circular way of thinking. "I'm not a astronomer, so I have no idea about how any of that works. Jurou was the one who was good at all the science and math." She taps at her cheek with the pencil. "I'm just the artist whom everyone thought was involved in... well the things Uta sounds like she's involved in right now." That may be why mention of it bothers her.

Her eyes snap towards Jazuhanzu, as of taking in everything the Undine is sharing. Kita has never been someone who really delved much into those sort of stories. "Mmm. I'm not sure a door suits the feeling I'm aiming for, but I'm planning on including his lifelong companion, and then the feeling of everyone coming together from across Yamato." She is jotting down some of the ideas, though.

Goldenblade is only barely hanging on to the conversation between Jazz and Kita, and while she had her own excursion into strange places, it wasn't with Gilgamesh, and she didn't understand most of what went on at the time. "This isn't a body scan," she admits. "My grandson said it would be, so I was confused when I turned out like this." She shrugs, switches topics. "But anyhow. Maybe the frame of the flag is the doorway? Anyhow, you're focused on the destination, there's no reason to dwell on where you'd been."

"And on top of that, I can still -feel- the arms!", Uta grumbles as she swings left and right, arms flailing like noodles.

The noodle arms. they are contagious. "I just cannot move them!"

"Quick, I need your help!", Uta exclaims, her arms flailing as expected as she leans over abruptly. "Status effects are spreading! I need one of you to inject me with an antidote before I turn into a boneless chicken for the rest of the day!" She inhales deeply. "Here's what you need to do: first of all, we need to get the vial with the antidote-"

All color drains from Uta's face. What follows is a squeaky wheeze: "...from my inventory... oh no..."

She looks down at her arms. Some attempt at movement can be seen in her shoulders, but her arms remain stubbornly lifeless. Jumping and flopping the Newfound Noodles also seems not to help.

She sighs. "Well, at least it's very likely I'll also fall asleep. Hopefully I'll have interesting, vivid dreams-" She turns to Kita. "IT'S NOT WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE!", she blurts out.

"I think I've mentioned I've randomized my avatar," Uta comments to Goldenblade, then mumbles, "One of these days I really need to look into a mirror."

"Is that companion Enkido the dragon?" Asks Uta. "...if so, was there mourning on Gilgamesh's part when Enkido was lost?"

"If you say so," says Jazz with a nonchalant shrug to Kita, seeming fine with her artistic inclinations as they are. "The bull symbolizes one's ability to achieve change. Power. Strength. Authority. Fertility, too, but *change* is the important marker there. To shape the world, or, I suppose, to escape its limitations. The snake symbolized immortality, of course..." She's dropped down on the ground, now, casually drawing a in the earth herself, though in truth the ancient cuneform symbol for Uruk itself, absently, "No, the star was Anu," she muses, "It's been too long since I looked at anything cuneiform, not that it was ever my speciality in the first place." She stops what she's doing for a moment, glances up to Kita.

"Uh..." Kita is not anywhere on the spectrum of a trained medical professional. In fact, her toolkit distinctly lacks any sort of healing abilities whatsoever. "Uta, I'm a black mage, not a doctor." Thankfully, at least, she seems to be holding on to the moment as worry passes on her features.

At the very least, the Spriggan has the energy and sense of mind to rebel against her questionable medical practices. "Right. You're going to be fine. You said it, yourself, it'll just make you feel boneless and have funny dreams. Not the worst result of an OD that I've seen." That she's /seen/? Kita apparently has some life experiences that she doesn't usually share quite so willingly.

There is a glance over towards Goldenblade, "This is me, dyed hair, scars, piercings, the whole thing. Just not the Imp stuff. Private schools in Tokyo weren't very fond of me, as you might imagine." She smirks.

There is a hard tug, trying to pull her mind back to the discussions of the flag and she clenches her eyes shut briefly, "Yes, Enikdo. The creature was important to Lord Gilgamesh." Then, she opens them again looks at Jazuhanzu. "I'm no expert, either, and I'm not sure how much of it applies, that's why I'm traveling to meet people who know him well, to get their ideas of what might be good to include."

Then, with a sound of discomfort, "We... should really focus on whatever is happening to Uta right now and not this."

"No, no, let's continue with Gilgamesh!", Uta urges. "I have to know more about the Crystal Tower Rebellion! About the song known as Artosh's Anger! About what, exactly, is meant with Aincrad standing where the Crystal Tower once stood! Because I've tried to Loremaster the event 'The Replacement of the Crystal Tower with the Aincrad Tower', and I ended up with one heck of a headache. I suspect it's because this event doesn't exist. Then what does it mean that Aincrad stands where the Crystal Tower stood? What was the Crystal Tower rebellion about? Why lfgafafa fafa flagafa? Flaaaaaa...."

It seems like Uta's flopping to the ground, in a suspiciously haphazard configuration. Noodle body! Also, her tongue isn't responding well, and she's showing the first signs of drowsiness, as shown by the slowing down of her speech.

Goldenblade hrms to Uta about a mirror, but says, "You don't need to know what /you/ look like. You need to know what other people look like. You can always find 'you'." More guy thinking. But she does everything with the menu in any event, so she doesn't really know. As far as reaching into another player's inventory, she wonders, "Is that even possible?" Though, it's probably more possible for her than most people. She somehow wound up with several skills that you'd normally associate with someone on the wrong side of the law.

When Jazz discusses symbolism and flags, it's completely over Goldenblade's jead, though she listens intently, curious. "Flags shouldn't be too complicated," is her only comment. "People need to be able to make their own to plant in their yards on whatever their national nation day holiday is."

She peers at Kita, and nods slowly about the private schools not being very happy. "Unlike America, Japan doesn't value individuality. Conformity is the way. You have to be pretty wealthy before people will put up with individuality. Though in America, everyone's an individual, so people have to work at being visually remarkable. I'm surprised /any/ school would let you in, like that," she observes, more a comment on schools than the outlandishness of the appearance.

She looks over as Uta flops on the ground, and wriggles around like a dying fish. "I could just take her back to Eas to sleep it off?" she suggests to Jazz and Kita.

There isn't even time for Kita to process most of the information that Uta starts to share at remarkably high speed, until her tongue all but gives up the fight. It all just leaves the Imp giving a concerned look and a shake of her head. "She'll be fine. It will wear off." Kita doesn't know this for certain, but she has to believe that Uta wouldn't do anything to herself that would cause real harm, right?

There is a glance over towards Goldenblade, a smirk showing on her lips. "You sound like Jurou's parents. Ended up getting rid of my lip and eyebrow piercings because I didn't think they'd approve." That certainly explains the couple of spots of facial scarring where the piercings had been left to heal over. "Not that they approved of their class president daughter dating me anyways, for entirely other reasons." You know, the whole being a girl thing. "They got over it, eventually. And I went to Eriol, it's probably the most eccentric private school in the city."

Pushing herself up, she dusts her trousers off. "If you think you can carry her, sure. Otherwise we can call some of the guards to help." Looking around, that same confused expression passes on her features, "I... need to get back to my research. Now which way was it to the library." She starts to wander in what is, thankfully, the right direction.

Goldenblade nods slowly to Kita, she would definitely not approved of her son dating a girl with eyebrow and lip piercings. She had two boys, and they liked girls, so the whole same-sex relationship thing was never something she had to deal with. Which is just as well, as she would probably not be modern about that, either. But she can at least separate what concerns her and her family personally and what happens to other people. She's got no heartburn with anyone else doing what they want with who they want. "It sometimes takes some time for a parent to adjust to an adult child telling them how they want to live their life. Your reflex is to continue to guide them."

As far as carrying Uta, Goldenblade shrugs, grabs one limp arm, and pulls the spriggan up over her shoulders in a fireman's carry. "We're headed back to Eas," she tells Uta, who might be aware, or might not. Or might not remember. It's all so fluid when you're that smashed. Goldenblade may be confused, but she's also pretty strong, she's carried drunk coworkers home before. She's in construction, that's a very physical job, and she doesn't shirk the heavy lifting.

Uta's eyes roll around aimlessly, as she's swung over Goldenblade's shoulder, and with a stunned smile, she slurs, "Looook, I'm flyiiiiiiiing...."

She even instinctively spreads her wings, which seems to have been spared the boneless fate (for now), and flaps them as if she was airborne. "Look at those people! They look like ants from up here..." A pause as she attempts (and mostly fails) to focus on the people present. "Very... big... ants?"

Haru has, in fact, still been around! A fair amount of it was with the ever popular Oxygen bottle. The rest of it he got a chim and stepped away to have some of the conversation there on it. There is no objection that Haru needs to get more exercise. The Noodle Arms shall rise to eventually just be Arms! His first observation is Uta's situation, "The Noodle plague is spreading." And away she goes. A finger snaps. Let this be a lesson: Cardio. Don't want to be huffing Oyxgen and miss all the good stuff.