Scene #8049: A Peaceful Talk Where Nobody Gets Stabbed

Owner	Pose
Kale Hearthward	PODUNKAVILLE, CITYSTATE "Your tea, and I'll swing right on back by when your date arrives, hun," says the waitress, placing a cup down in front of Kale before sashaying away. "She's not my-" Kale says, but she's already gone. The spot settled on for this meeting is a cafe on a quiet avenue in Podunkaville, a seaside town most notable for its unnotability. The outdoor table Kale picked is shaded by an awning but otherwise has clear access to the sky, is far enough away from other tables that anyone sitting there wouldn't be overheard by casual observers, and has a clear line of sight to the ocean (about half a minute's sprint away). Some thought has been given to making neither participant here feel like they're cornered and that they both have a clear avenue of escape. Kale himself is sitting where he has a clear view of the direct approach from the town's warpgate - and via a reasonably reflective shop window across the street, a decent view of the other direction, just in case. Now to wait. He sips at his tea, carefully, and rehearses what he's going to say. This probably isn't going to be a pleasant meeting, but it's one he feels he has to have.
Rita Ma	Kale can see, in the reflective shop window, someone who is extremely not Rita. She's half a foot taller; there are bags under her eyes; she has dark, close-cut hair, and she's dressed boyishly. He probably will not give her a second glance. She passes by the cafe along with the motion of the crowd, eyes Kale closely in passing, slips off into an alley, and re-emerges a few moments later as Rita, who returns and seats herself at the table. Her body language is tense and guarded; her expression is carefully neutral. One probably couldn't ask for better, given past interactions. "Hi, Kale," she says. Not 'mister Hearthward'. "How's the tea?" She picks up a menu, but only briefly glances at it. Not much conforms to her dietary needs. Her foot taps the terrace anxiously, but she'll wait for him to broach the real topic, once pleasantries have passed.
Kale Hearthward	Kale's as he always looks. Dressed up a bit, not too much, sort of a casual-formal-casual. "Hello Rita. Tea's fine. Nothing to write home about." Kale's marginally less guarded, at least due to the fact that he's the one that asked for this meeting and has the topic to broach. But before we can get to that, pleasantries! ==ONE PLEASANTRIES LATER.== "So, I think it'd be best for everyone if you stopped talking to Lilian," he says, carefully picking up his tea to sip at it again. "As in, ever talking to her again, if you can avoid it."
Rita Ma	Rita orders one glass of ice water, when she's able. No lemon. Kale, when he gets to the point, makes her droop. She doesn't flinch or recoil in shock as one might expect. Her eyes slide off to the side, instead; her shoulders slump a little. "I know," she says. "But I don't think I can. If I let go of everyone I'm bad for... I wouldn't really have anyone left. Can't you understand something like that?"
Kale Hearthward	Kale... ... is quiet for a while. At least as long as it takes for Rita to go through her reaction. He watches her carefully. And then, otherwise keeping his expression carefully neutral, he nods. "I know." "I know, and I understand. And I suspected you wouldn't say yes, but I had to ask." He puts his tea down, and stretches, in the manner of one who's about to tackle a thing they would rather not tackle but if they have to tackle it then they want to work out the kinks first. "I cannot get you to stop talking to her. I suspect I cannot get her to stop talking to you, either. Which means..."
Rita Ma	"I think... if you'd said that right after we fought, over that monster, I'd have agreed with you. But after everything with the Wheel, and the ink... I'm too close to fixing it." It takes a big, deep breath for Rita to steel herself and straighten up again. She's only a middling actor in most senses, but she's quite good at masking distress. She does so here, burying the earlier melancholy even though it definitely still lingers. "Which means you'll have to help us, right? If you want what's best for Ms. Rook, and we're not ready to let each other go, then... we have to find a way to be better for each other." She's being awfully optimistic.
Kale Hearthward	Rita is being awfully optomistic. She's being wildly optomistic. She's being unbelievably optomistic. She's got her head firmly in the clouds if she thinks Kale Hearthward, East Wind, Paladins Lieutenant, will help mend the relationship between his coworker/comrade and a known watch agent. "Yeah." And just because she's correct doesn't change that. "I'm... not at all fond of the idea but if this is going to continue then it's going to continue with as little... distress, to Lilian as possible," says Kale. "She's my..." there's a conversational path split here, as Kale waffles between 'friend' and 'coworker' briefly, before the needle lands barely on: "... friend, too," he continues. He picks up his tea, mostly as an excuse to stop talking again for a bit.
Rita Ma	Another deep breath in, then out. This one shakes, quivers, as she exhales. Is it a little laugh? Or the shivers of an unspoken relief? Then she smiles at him. It's a really, really cute smile, unreservedly sunny. It's not a mystery why- okay, it's slightly less of a mystery why Lilian likes her so much. "Thank you, Mr. Hearthward." "I'm still not sure you're... no, I'm not sure the Paladins are good for her, in general. Gilgamesh tried to stab me for helping Lilian's friend. Warfarin wanted to cut me up. Ioanna tried to 'save' soul-eating monsters from me. But she wants to stick with you, too. It's important to her. So... I want to make that relationship good, too. If I can't break it up." A little sip of her water. She's still tense, but less so. "So, what did you plan to do?"
Kale Hearthward	Kale glances to the side as she looks relieved and smiles, as if he's slightly awkward - okay, because he is awkward about that particular reaction. He nods at the thanks, and diplomatically does not bristle when she throws his own paraphrased words back at him about how she feels about Lilian and the Paladins. "..." He sips at his tea, and waves down the waitress to bring some more. He sips at it again. And then it becomes evident - Rita is indeed being overly optomistic, it's just that that wasn't the thing she was too optomistic about. "Well, have you tried talking it out with her?" says Kale, lowering his tea. See, Kale doesn't have a plan.
Rita Ma	Rita deflates again- a little less than the first time, but still noticeably- at 'have you tried talking it out'. "Yeah. We both know what the problem is. It's just... hard to deal with." Another sip of water is necessary. She has to compose her thoughts, having never expected to need to explain them in this specific way to this specific person. Her eyes rest on her hands afterwards, folded on the table. "There's a weight in my heart. And every time I sacrifice for someone, it gets a little lighter. But every time someone sacrifices things for me, it gets a lot heavier. ... It's very, very heavy by now, Mr. Hearthward." "Lilian... wants to care for me. She wants me to be important to her. And that's hard for me to accept, even if she's important to me. When she gives things up for me, when she gets hurt trying to help me, when she has to choose between me and someone else, it hurts. It makes the weight heavier." "I don't know if I can be strong enough to accept that, like she wants me to. I don't know how. But she gets so hurt when I don't let her."
Kale Hearthward	The first couple of responses that Kale comes up with are discarded. He visibly runs her words through his head again. "I..." "..." He doesn't know if he has nearly anywhere near enough experience to navigate this directly. 'Sacrifice' to him means staying out working the family fields and windmills late into the afternoon when you'd rather be playing, which seems petty and trivial in retrospect, or the sorta 'throwing yourself into harms way to protect your charges' of the Paladins which is... really just something he does automatically and uncritically, meaning he doesn't really have too many insights on that front. There is a big flashing red warning sign in his mental map - danger, it says, attempting to engage this directly will more likely than not end badly. Think of an alternative approach or try to solve this indirectly. Repeat, do not attempt to engage this directly. Kale attempts to engage this directly. "Well, ah, it's... something that you just... have to accept," he says. "There are people who just... need more sacrifices than others, and by the same token, there's people who... do nothing but sacrifice." Is there something there? Kale grasps at whatever's there. "People like Lilian? They just... don't stop." Yeah, there might be something there. Build on it, throw in something personal. "Lilian got on my case once, because I was resting in bed. I wanted to take it easy, get some downtime in, like, everyone needs a little bit of downtime. But it's like she can't... comprehend it? She called me lazy." He shrugs. "So - she just throws all of herself into stuff, overloads her schedule massively, probably shorts herself on sleep a lot, uses magic to get more things done. That girl is just... like, she's practically made of sacrifice." Okay. Bring it home, bring it to a point. "So..." He shrugs, and goes for his tea, picking it up and holding it up to his beak without drinking from it yet. "I don't know if this will fix everything," he says, to temper expectations. "But have you considered that you could... change your perspective on things a bit? Like, what are big sacrifices for you are just her everyday things for her. It's a huge deal for you, but it's just something she does for her. So don't... like, you mentioned a weight in your heart. Can you let Lilian's things weigh a little less heavily? Because that's just sort of who she is." Kale gazes into the surface of his tea, as if he could divine some wisdom from it. "Take what she does for you seriously, but... also look at it from her frame of reference." He sips.
Rita Ma	"It's something that you just have to accept." Rita leans back in her chair and sinks down, as if beginning to submerge below the edge of the table. "I know," she says. "That that's just how she is. That she does it for everybody she cares about. I'm not just being 'useless' or 'needy' when she gives things up for me. But . . ." Rita submerges a little further. ". . . I've known people like her before, too. And it's still hard, Mr. Hearthward. That's why I wanted to take that monster. If I can change the world more, get a longer reach, then maybe I can help enough people to make that weight a lot lighter, for once. And then I can accept her making it a little heavier." Her eyes turn downwards. "I hope, anyway."
Kale Hearthward	Kale watches Rita submerge with increasing concern. Probably should have heeded those red flashing warning signs. Oh, and she brought up the monster - that is one hundred percent something Kale does not want to encourage. And it's something he's going to draw the line at for trying to evaluate whether that's a good thing or bad thing on the Lilian Relationship scale. INDIRECT APPROACH IT IS! Suggest that if Lilian and Rita lower the temperature a bit, lower the tension a bit, it might be easier to come to a mutual understanding. Get them to go to a theme park or something, or pitch some softball feel-good mission that the Watch and Paladins can align on, and then they can broach the conversation again in better circumstances. Yeah. This is an entirely workable and reasonable plan, and it's far better than trying to engage the terrorist imuto on the topic at hand. "Reach... is one of those tricky things." What are you doing, Kale. Stop. "I have a pretty long reach. I gave up a lot of agency for it, that was my price, having to deal with bureaucracy and rules and stuff. But I did all of that because it was a price I was prepared to pay." "You... sound like you're trying to buy your reach by giving up things you don't want to give up. Prices you aren't willing to pay, or - that you're willing to pay, but aren't okay with paying. That's a lot more of a difficult road." He exhales. "You want... to maybe find a path that won't clash so hard against Lilian, instead of taking this one and hoping that the clash won't shatter one or both of you."
Rita Ma	"No." This, at least, gets Rita to sit back up. She summons her deep reserves of pluck, once more no longer drooping. She doesn't look angry, but she is firm. "I thought a lot about what exactly I was sorry for. I had to get it straight in my head. And I decided I wasn't sorry for what I did, with the monster." "I'm sorry for taking away Ms. Rook's choice of whether or not to fight me. I'm sorry for selfishly stealing her chance to sacrifice for me, and forcing her to be my enemy. That's the only thing." "I know what I have to do, and I know how to do it. And I'm not going to be sorry that she ended up in my way. I trust Ms. Rook not to be so fragile she can't handle that, and to see that it's as much her choice as mine. I don't throw myself in her way and get hurt every time she does something I don't agree with." "There's only one way I can have 'reach', Mr. Hearthward. And-" Clink. The glass in Rita's hand develops a crack from base to rim. She looks at it, visibly startled. That snaps her out of her diatribe, at least a little bit. ". . . I'm doing my best, Mr. Hearthward. But you can't ask me to accept her sacrifices for me, and also ask me not to sacrifice for other people. I'm not . . . strong enough, to go back to being helpless like that again."
Kale Hearthward	Kale listens, nodding - not looking terribly happy, but nodding. He looks like he's building up to say something, towards the end of her statements- Then he startles when the glass cracks. That also seems to snap him out of whatever pattern he's been on. "... Right. Okay. I'm listening. I believe you. But." He takes a breath. "I feel like..." "... While maybe there isn't a clean solution right now, if you feel like things are at an impasse, if we... lower the temperature a bit? Maybe a solution can appear. Or if not a solution, we can see the next steps forward." "Let me see if I can't find some... softball mission. Something the Watch and Paladins can align on. And then have you and her in it, and..." He shrugs. "Give you two some... chances to work together, maybe?" "It's that, or find a theme park for everyone to go to for basically the same result, and I'm pretty sure Rook won't 'waste' an afternoon on a theme park, without some cover story."
Rita Ma	Rita stares down at the glass. The sunlight refracts through it, through the water, through the spiderwebbing crack, to shed pretty whorls of light and dimples of shadow on the tablecloth. "That sounds like..." She pauses, thinks it over, and then looks a tiny bit surprised. Her eyes meet Kale's again. "That sounds like a good idea, actually. I'd appreciate it a lot. Thank you, Mr. Kale." A pause. She smiles, a little feebly. "No giant monsters this time. I promise." Just one little one.
Kale Hearthward	"No giant monsters," repeats Kale, nodding. "... Don't think this has changed anything between us," he adds, fixing her with his gaze. "You and I are still-" "Oh my stars, did we give you a glass with a crack in it?" The waitress swoops in, looking concerned. "Hold tight, hun, I'll get you a new one." "... We're..." Kale's lost his momentum. "Nothing's changed between us," he decides to just say.
Rita Ma	Rita's somber listening is broken by the waitress. She turns around, both hands raised in frantic apology. "No! It's my fault, it's okay! I dropped it, that's all... I'm so sorry." She might be under the impression that glassware is more valuable than it really is. Or maybe she's just Like This. When she turns back to Kale, her look is long and appraising. "Yeah. Nothing's changed." But she'd probably feel at least a little bad about going for the fried chicken now. "But thank you, Kale."