Setsuna Higashi

[passifloraincarnata]

● SETSUNA HIGASHI
You've reached Higashi Setsuna. Leave a message and how best to reach you and I'll get back to you as soon as I can ...?
[video | audio | text]

Comments

[heterochrocatic]

your stuff is on my side of the room

[ Catra, what stuff? ]

[passifloraincarnata]

I don't have any stuff ...? I have no idea what that could be.

[this is very sad but it's also true, Setsuna has not done a thing to personalize their room since she got here, so has nothing to leave around anywhere, yet. oops]

[heterochrocatic]

i don't know. it's stuff.

whatever.

anyway uh.

i'm making some stuff in the kitchen do you want some if i bring u leftovers. no big deal if you don't.

[ Well that was a pivot. ]

[passifloraincarnata]

Oh, I wondered where you were sneaking off to at this hour. You're doing better at making new friends than I am, it seems ...

Well, I'll try and clean things up for when you get back! What did you make?

link goes to youtube just warning you

[heterochrocatic]

we're not friends. tenten just found out i didn't know how to cook and i'm not going to turn down free food

[ Definitely friends. ]

uh it's this chicken and mushroom thing? and something tenten called egg drop soup.

[ Have a picture of the chicken and mushroom dish. ]

[passifloraincarnata]

[they are definitely friends. Setsuna makes a note to try and talk to the ninja girl at some point outside of exchanging a few comments on the network.]

That's very impressive for someone who's never cooked anything before. Did you enjoy it?

[heterochrocatic]

well. i just followed directions.

and yeah it was good.

text;

[heterochrocatic]

hey uh about that thing on the anon whatever

text

[passifloraincarnata]

Which thing? The cannibalism thing?

Re: text

[heterochrocatic]

yeah, that one

Re: text

[passifloraincarnata]

Okay. Well ... I know from living with you that you're not a werewolf. And at your height you couldn't actually eat another person very easily otherwise. So I admit I am actually somewhat confused about what cannibalism has to do with you, Adora, and you potentially having sex with Adora at some point.

Re: text

[heterochrocatic]

Uh, I'm a cat

[ Person. ]

And 'pussy' is slang for, you know. The mons and labia and all that stuff.

Re: text

[passifloraincarnata]

Oh.

Sometimes, slang escapes me w(ﾟДﾟ)w. A clitoris is nothing like a cat, why would anyone call it a "pussy"?

text

[myagents]

Hello, miss Higashi.
I haven't responded to your message, but I have been thinking of it and I truly appreciate your kindness. I know I am not deserving of it and I perfectly understand if you don't want to tell me where you currently are, but please respond to this message to let me know you are safe in this emergency. I will be able to leave my dorm and join the searches, to hopefully put a stop to it. The shapeshifter targets minors and I remember you telling me you are an adolescent, so please be careful.

Re: text

[passifloraincarnata]

I am safe, Mister Pierce. Much safer, I suspect, than any New Hires on the dorm floor will be.

[She means you, Pierce! How weird, right, people showing concern for your well-being!]

It means a lot to hear this from you right now. You be careful, too. No heroics, OK?

[An ironic statement, given what she's going to be doing during all this, but she's a Pretty Cure and he's a therapist. He's objectively more vulnerable than she is unless this monster is weak to being talked to death.]

Re: text

[myagents]

["No heroics". Price has never been heroic, at all, and the only times when he stood up to someone it almost always backfired horribly. He won't be pulling any heroics for sure, but it would be nice to make it look like he did by the end of the whole deal.]

Alright. As soon as I find out something, I will update you.

Re: text

[passifloraincarnata]

Not if I update you first ( •̀ ω •́ )y

Re: text

[myagents]

[Price is surprised and delighted to see that enthusiasm. He very reluctantly sends a smiley face.]

:)

Re: text

[myagents]

[Price is not aware of Setsuna's double identity yet, has only heard about a magical girl helping during the Babadon't incident and certainly even if he saw her in person in either he wouldn't have recognized her anyway because there were dangers to focus on. So he thinks Setsuna has been in her hospital room all along.]

The situation with the shapeshifter has been taken care of. The person they were replacing was Adora. I am not a fighter so I focused on helping Sam Winchester and the others bring her back to safety. I did not see you in the hospital, though. Were you hiding? Are you safe?

Re: text

[passifloraincarnata]

Thanks for your concern, Mister Price, but it's all right. I was helping Kokichi with tracking everyone's movements for most of it when I wasn't looking for ... well, for Adora, it seems, outside the dorms, so I saw it die.

[It is not ... technically, a lie. But she also doesn't want to worry him with the truth, just this second, and an explanation might take longer than she's willing to spare for a text message at this time. So he gets a slightly abridged version of events.]

Audio

[71lines]

[Well, she might as well be doing something while she's in a medical bed.]

So, what do you know about image training?

audio

[passifloraincarnata]

Hmm, "image" training ... [She says it like the Japanese word she suspects Tenten means, "imeeji".] Like using my imagination to pre-visualize the outcome of what I want to do? We used to plan dance routines like that back home, and in theory I knew how to plot similarly as part of my training in Labyrinth, even if I rarely actually felt humanity needed the effort ...

Is that what you mean?

[71lines]

[Tenten suspects there's an accent being mocked somewhere, but she's not quite sure. Still, it's pretty close to what she meant.]

Probably closer to dancing. Think of it like mental shadow boxing. You get an 'image' of your opponent in your mind, an honest one, and start to think about how the fight would go, what you'd do, what they'd do, how you'd react, etc. It helps you start to get the timing down and predict the best ways to move, even if you aren't actually moving.

It's a little inferior to shadowboxing in that aspect, since you're not actually building muscle memory. But with an honest idea of your opponent and your own capabilities, once you've gotten good enough, you can step out of yourself and watch yourself fight in the third person. If you make a mistake, you'll be able to see yourself make it and take a note to correct it.

That takes some practice, but you're probably good enough to get a hang on it pretty quick, especially since you've done stuff like it before, right? With your dancing and, uh. World conquest.

Your 'image' will be a lot stronger, by the way, and more accurate, if you can hook multiple senses into it. Not just imagining the sting of your knuckles, but the smell of your chosen arena, the colors, the sound of the wind blowing through it... If you're going to get any good out of it, you need to build an entire world in your head, if that makes any sense. One nearly as real as this one.

Anyhow, in that aspect, being able to step out of yourself and spot your own mistakes from a third person perspective, the way I'd do it if I were watching you or you'd do it if you were critiquing a friend's dance technique, it's a little superior to shadowboxing.

Am I making sense? Have you been doing this before?

[passifloraincarnata]

[It's not mockery, it's just that the phrase "image training" is an inadequate approximation in English of the phrase Tenten's referring to and that Setsuna's thinking of, in Tenten's native language and Setsuna's second language, and Setsuna's smart enough to pick up on it and infer what the ninja actually means by the phrase anyway.]

[That said -]

I can't say I've ever really done anything like what you describe, not to that extent. I've certainly studied my opponents and contemplated their behaviors, workshopped potential strategies to compensate for their capabilities, and the like. I've studied dance routines and envisioned them in my mind ahead of actually practicing them. But I've never done that to the extent that such a thing could be so developed it might take the place of building the muscle memories necessary to make executing such preemptive considerations actually possible, per se.

... it is also quite difficult to pre-visualize such things when one's life often sees careful plans disrupted more often than not by the literally miraculous and unpredictable, such that it's been my experience to trust in the sort of seemingly unreliable things most people would never risk their lives expecting to be destroyed or saved by, like love, or dreams, or friendship, oftentimes above even the most careful of plans.

But I can see the value in the practice, I think, all the same.

[71lines]

Well, it won't build muscle memory, but it'll help plan and predict. And sometimes the only thing to do is to use opponents from your past, your friends, or even yourself.

[The number of times she's 'fought' Sakura, Lee, or the others can't be counted. Of course, neither can her losses. Or wins.]

Granted, unpredictable miracles happen. Like you said. And you can be flexible and try to predict everything, but a trap people can fall into is trying to stick too closely to their 'image' and not recognizing that things can and will be different. For instance, you've never seen me at the top of my game, so your image of me will be wrong. But with me telling you that, you might adjust too far or in the wrong way.

There are some chunin, journeymen ninjas like myself, who never get the hang of it. Some never learn how. But I think you're smart enough to get a hang of it and avoid some of the usual pitfalls.

Remember, it's as much about spotting flaws in your own technique as it is expecting the unexpected or planning for a real fight.