closed.

[dissent]

CHARACTERS ▶ Anders + Hawke.
LOCATION ▶ The Sleeping Sphynx.
SUMMARY ▶ Sim training absolutely counts as a date.
WARNINGS ▶ Will edit if any.

[ Anders hasn't spent as much time in simulations as he probably should have, and makes a point of refusing to jack into the Matrix proper, but he still has more experience than Hawke, who he'd lead to The Sleeping Sphynx and paid the man in an assortment of odds and ends he tends to use as currency, generally what's given to him in payment for his services that he has no real purpose for. The barter economy was never really and adjustment for him, given his last clinic had been in Darktown. Actually, getting anything at all is a shock.

They load in the white room first, and before Anders can really come to terms with Hawke actually looking like himself again, the city rushed into being around them. Skyscrapers. Cars. Streets full of people hurrying on their way. All of it different from both Thedas and Zion, and yet apparently one of the most common templates for Matrixes out there, including, if history is to be believed, the one Neo came from, before the fragmentation. Modern day Earth.

Specifically, New York City. With ... some minor variations, discussed in advance, a tweak in a code that gives them the capacity to make us of anomalous skills. It's not the same as their magic. More like... the capacity for superpowers. (Maybe it's lifted from Heroes, or the MCU, or a dozen other urban fantasy worlds.) The point is, there are plenty of chances to play around with the impossible.

Anders has a hand curled with quiet possessiveness around Hawke's elbow, like he doesn't want him to get swept off in the crowd, and he's still staring at him, though it's turned more nuanced, scrutinizing his reactions even as he gives him whatever time he needs to adjust. ]

Comments

[dissent]

Well, maybe not Sundrrmount specifically.

[ Anders muses, turning them down the little path without really thinking about it. Exploration is a habit borne of relative poverty; unexplored nooks and crannies tends to have all sorts of junk that can be collected and resold, something he actually picked up from Hawke. Of course, in the Matrix there's nothing that wasn't coded in, and none of it can be sold or taken into the real world, so they're not going to be rummaging about, but it unconsciously informs his decision. That and the fact that he quite likes being alone with Hawke, getting to stake a bigger claim on his attention. ]

Just, you know. Outdoors. Trees and such.

[ An airy wave of his free hand to indicate the environs. Anders doesn't really realize how unusual that is for him to say. He's always quite liked going outside, has spent plenty of nights sleeping under the stars, but most of his free time in Kirkwall was spent ensconced in the dank underground tunnels of Darktown. Justice had drawn him away from the beauty and the light, or maybe it was before that, the urge some unanalyzed byproduct of his Joining, but either way neither of those factors are influences now and Anders does miss the sun. ]

[forcemageure]

[ Hawke could count on one hand the number of outdoorsy environments he'd seen Anders in, ever, because there were all of three of them: the Wounded Coast, the countryside surrounding Chateau de Snot, or whatever it had been called, and the Vinmark Chasm. If the last even counted. So he notices how unusual it is, even if nature had appeared to be about the only thing Anders had liked about Duke Prosper's sporting even.

He's never taken sunlight or trees for granted, exactly, they've just always been part of his life, even if Malcolm instilled awareness of how much work that took the family as a unit. Just now observing Anders' interaction with the green-gold tunnel walls and ceiling that stretch around them, he's not thinking of any of that. Rather, that of everything it feels like he lost to get here, it might be worth it for this.

Which is probably his complete allotment of sentimentality for the month, so he doesn't exactly voice all of that even if his look speaks volumes. ]

We should do a beach sometime. I do miss the ocean.

[ He ...misses everything not Zion, honestly. Even caves! Integration could be uh, going better.

This is all right, though. To demonstrate he borrows their looped fingers as a whole so he can wrap an arm around Anders' waist for a second, smile close-mouthed and crooked. A bigger claim on Hawke's attention indeed. ]

[dissent]

We can go wherever you want. They can recreate just about anywhere.

[ But for now, something easy and peacable, that allows him to walk along with Hawke tucked into his side, arm slung companionably over his broad shoulders. There's a long inbuilt grace period in this sim, because he thought Hawke might need time to get used to simply being in a sim before actually having to do anything.

The air is cool along this pathway, fern-damp, and they find themselves walking along bars to the left, nearly invisible amongst the plants. Anders doesn't startle or flinch outwardly when he notices them, but they give him a tiny moment's pause, breath held, like he's bumped the place where an old wound was as is expecting pain.

Further along, the fence connects to brown brick struts that support an overhead bridge, the path widening out and turning into asphalt below their feet, gaining a sidewalk, though there are no cars on the road except for a single parked truck. ]

[forcemageure]

[ It doesn't feel particularly like anything he needs to get acclimated to; for better or worse the return to a body (or at least the casing of one) that makes sense to him stitches back into place all the self-assurance only slowly regrowing in Zion. Utterly unfamiliar surroundings aside the longer he's there the more he walks and talks and breathes and generally is, like he belongs there.

Not that that means complacency, the more visible signs of hypervigilance in someone like Hawke are just obscured by his propensity to lean on and flop against things like a puppy (yes) that could lapse into sleep at any time. Which he might! He just also might, or ...have might, until recently, also explode near things into flames. As the situation called for.

Right now thankfully it calls for none of that, the bars pricking more his curiosity than anything else. The sidewalk slopes up, becoming an actual hill the further it stretches, to the point where Hawke actually has to lengthen his strides to keep up with it and he ducks out from Anders' arm to hold his hand again instead. Actually, because he can, he snags both hands with an expression of intense (ridiculous) determination, like Anders is possibly a wheelbarrow that needs to be hauled up this incredibly steep incline.

Although emerging from the greenery altogether actually does stop him short a second, the source of the sounds slowly trickling in from inside now at least kind of explained. He'd just filtered most of them out because they seemed normal. ]

Anders, if you were any other person I'd suspect this to be a meticulously orchestrated prank.

[ It's not, it's just the very outskirts of the Zoo! Where they have a farm animal exhibit for, you know, who haven't left the same block in the Bronx their entire lives and are really only familiar with like ...pigeons, and maybe a neighbor's chihuahua, in terms of animal life. ]

[dissent]

[ Anders is the kind of person who would try really hard to come up with a really excellent prank, and it would end up having no effect, or worse, be actively upsetting. Chickens are so inane that they automatically exclude that possibility, so Hawke is right to do the same.

Anders' bemused expression is another point in his favor, since the man can't lie with his face to save his life. ]

Is that...?

[ They walk closer, and yes, it is. Anders has plenty of experience with farm
animals, given a large portion of his life was spent sleeping in stables and hay barns, stealing a couple of eggs. It's a sound he associates distinctly with the broad brown countryside of Fereldan, rather than all this programmed urban greenery, and while he gives back one of Hawke's hands he keeps the other squeezed tight. ]

It's some sort of exhibit. Look, they have signs with information.

[forcemageure]

[ Hawke also hangs on tightly, because chickens are vicious monsters, full of hate and perfectly willing to remind a person how recently, in terms of the average Earth Matrix's total life, they were dinosaurs.

...a little of that is actually serious. Specifically: chickens are by and large hideously tempered creatures, and Hawke is baffled why anyone would keep them for reasons that are apparently not food. He circles the exhibit as far as he can go without making handholding awkward, as if attempting to ascertain some inherent magical property. The laying gold eggs thing would be a little on the nose, surely. ]

Well, I suppose if you really wanted to enforce how the world works, you would take your children to see the animals most likely to shit on you.

[dissent]

[ Anders lets Hawke look, not particularly interested in the petting zoo and fairly inured to seeing farm animals, but also not finding it particularly bizarre that they're here. Or, no more so than every other bizarre thing that cities are and do. He does look somewhat wistfully at a goat, though. ]

I miss milk sometimes.

[ Remember, two years. ]

[forcemageure]

[ Ah, so perhaps by the same token in two years this kind of thing will seem normal to Hawke. As it is he's still used to functionality and display being entirely separate animals, as it were. A working sword, for example, doesn't belong behind glass no matter how pretty its hilt is, especially not in a city.

Meanwhile he just stops himself midst accruing frustration that he can't simply react to something Anders wants by getting it. That kind of thinking would otherwise be pretty capable of stalling him out, and the only thing to do here is move forward. Literally, in this case.

I know.

[ He gives that a second of softness, but then tugs Anders' hand where they're still tethered together. ]

Though I imagine I'll have to pass through several stages of wide-eyed barbarism before I can start properly missing anything, personally. Come on, I can't imagine animal husbandry was what you had in mind for this little venture.

[dissent]

I didn't actually know there'd be animals here.

[ Anders admits. ]

I wonder if they have cats?

[ He, of course, is thinking of ordinary felines, so when they reach the signpost indicating "big cats" among other animals he doesn't really think anything of it, just directs them down that way. Though they pass other animals first, and what seemed bemusing but charming when it was simply chickens and baby sheep, and then an aviary that reminds him of the one owned by the Earl of Redcliffe, becomes slightly more distressing as they go. The animals are bigger, more suited to the wilderness than the faux homes they've been locked in, and Anders stops for a while outside the cage of a black and white bear, reading the description with a frown. ]

It says here it's a vegetarian. I don't see why they couldn't just let it live in the park.

[forcemageure]

[ It also looks like it's perpetually comatose, so despite any sane former Ferelden's usual response to 'bears' being 'shit, shit, we're all going to die,' Hawke doesn't really make the correlation in this case. ]

Just zap open the latch. It probably won't even wake up long enough to notice.

[ He's not seriously suggesting this, but half the things Hawke doesn't suggest seriously are certainly things he'd do anyway. ]

If you need a distraction I can stand on my head or something!

[ Also something he'd do anyway, if he wouldn't just pitch face forward. ]

[dissent]

[ Anders glances around, but there isn't really anybody in sight; he feels like all the simulated people were back on the busy city streets. It's hard for him to really be concerned about being caught, since he's spent enough time in sims to have a constant awareness of his body lying in a chair in the real world, jacked in through the back of the neck, an operator ever-present. Somehow, this doesn't translate all the way through to thinking of the animals as programs.

So he does it, just a quick spell, the feeling of magic pulled from the fade through to him deeply nostalgic. The door creaks open half an inch, and as predicted, the panda bear does absolutely nothing. Anders shrugs. ]

Well, that was anticlimactic.

[ He leaves it be, tugging Hawke to move on. To yet more caged animals. He's starting to feel somewhat discontent with this whole experience. ]