Educating The Boredom Away [Arisu & Rimma - Open To Join]

--- ARISU ---

-better than watching paint dry-

With nothing else to do, Arisu had immediately headed towards the library after coordinating with Rimma. She'd brough some dalmation notebooks and mechanical pencils, just to be prepared, and already had them set out and waiting. She herself, though, was lost in her phone, scrolling through articles and videos from the recent incident. Truth told, there was so much material it was overwhelming, not to mention entirely outside of the realm of her usual internet wanderings. She had no time to watch television, and up until recently hadn't had any friends in the area, so her exposure to this had been minimal prior to now, and she still didn't feel like she had a firm grasp on just how bad things had gotten.

About the time that Rimma arrived, Arisu set her phone down and rubbed at her temples with one hand, face half-hidden by the gesture. Though she was still struggling to assimilate more of the facts of the matter, she was very distinctly disturbed by even the blanket facts of what she'd read. She wasn't entirely sure she wanted to broach the subject in person with Rimma- or anyone else, come to think of it- until she had a more comprehensive understanding of the events and their implications. So, when she realized Rimma was closing in, she wiped the stress off her face- and the articles off her phone- with a goofy grin and lifted a hand to wave energetically, engaging the same time-tested responses she used to seem bouncy and cheerful despite the faint gloom and chill that persisted in her presence.

"Ohayooooo, Rimma-chaaaan!" She stage-whispered, this being a library but wanting to express her exuberance regardless. "Come, sit, I have a spot saved for you. What are we working on? Is our teacher awesome? Is it the physics of leaping from roof to roof? A thesis on the best ways to dismantle villainized mecha? What sort of exciting lesson are we investigating?" She looked just like her picture, but quite a lot more energetic than the reserved school selfie had suggested.

--- ARISU ---

-better than watching paint dry-

"Speaking of which, do you know who our teacher is?" The comments about how awesome they were sure to be lacked a gendered pronoun, which suggested that either Rimma didn't know or the teacher was just non-binary. "And do you know what their quirk is? I love mine, but it's best against a certain category of quirk- come to think of it, I might actually have trouble taking on folks without quirks, dumb as that sounds," muttered Arisu as she watched Rimma for reactions and nonverbal cues. "Or like yours. I can think of some ways I might be able to fend for myself, but quirks that deal with cold or the dark don't sound like they'll give me much latitude for error."

The reveal that their study topic was... an area of study and not something pracitcable was disappointing- at least until Rimma started getting into the details with her and sharing her own thesis on the topic of defusing a bank heist rapidly. Arisu gave it her full attention, studying the answers Rimma had come up with and nodding enthusiastically. "Yeah! Wow, you've got a lot of nonlethal suppression built into your quirk, don't you? You can stick people in place, jam their weapons, knock them out through hypothermia- I... haven't really tried to use my quirk on people before so I'd be short on options to defuse an armed robbery."

Arisu sits back and muses on the topic for a few moments. "Well. I suppose I might be able to render gunfire useless if I could get close enough without getting gunned down. But it wouldn't stop other violence. I'd probably need to resort to terror tactics to get them to give up without hurting them- or, without hurting more than one of them, I mean. Gosh, how awful is that," muttered the girl. "I don't really wanna hurt anyone, but I'd rather see people trying to hurt others end up hurting than the victims they pick. I guess that's kind of the line we have to draw, right? If we don't have a quirk that will let us shut someone down without injury, we have to get used to the idea of opting to let their choices to violate the rights of others volunteer them to have theirs violated in the process of protecting innocents."

Arisu looked back up at Rimma, hesitant to even broach the subject she was thinking about. "I... saw... some videos recently. About the Tokyo5 incident. That... sort of threw me. I'd always thought of being a hero as this abstract, manga thing, where bad guys are carted off in cuffs with soot marks and bruises yelling about how they'll get their revenge and stuff." She was quiet a second. "The broadcast I saw was nothing like that. It was brutal. I've never seen that much hate in someone before. And- and that includes the people who thought I was a freak, even back when all my quirk did was make it a little dark and cold around me. That was- that was more like disgust, which is its own brand of awful, you know..? But those... villains," she uttered, the word dropping like a brick. "- they were there to hurt. Because they hated. And they wanted everyone to know they had the power to do that then, and any time they wanted. That's- that's terrorism, isn't it? The literal definition?"

"Have the teachers said anything about all that yet?" Her voice was quiet. This wasn't a fun topic.

--- ARISU ---

-better than watching paint dry-

"Huh. Well, like what," Arisu mused, a little stifled but unrelenting in her curiosity, "-can you tell me about our teacher? I don't really have any info on them at all. Anything helps!" Her tone was still excited, still intrigued, but carried enough softness that she hoped it wouldn't alienate Rimma if she didn't have anything further to share.

The video seemed to be exactly the sort of thing Arisu needed to see. She tuned in one hundred percent, staring wide-eyed as students she'd never seen, much less met, chattered in various degrees of profanity and anger about the situation, culminating that that five-way cut of echoed sentiment.

She still didn't look happy, but Arisu nodded a little, huffing faintly. "Thanks. That helps. I'm glad I'm not the only one with bile in my throat over this whole stupid mess. We're all people. It's the ones that can't see that on both sides causing issues, not quirkers or non-quirkers. Right?"

Arisu looked to Rimma, then shook her head a little. "... the best thing we can do for the victims is to bring the people responsible to justice so nobody joins them. I am terrified, but of what people might do in reaction to this sort of thing. Some people won't see a bunch of kids taking vidya as any real statement of who supports what."

The girl stares at the table quietly and murmurs, "People are gonna get hurt. And I'm really scared of just how many will. Because this is- this is an angry, careless match. Next comes wildfire. And, if that doesn't get stopped..."

Worldfire was the word in her head. But she couldn't bring herself to say it.

--- ARISU ---

-better than watching paint dry-

"Hrm. Well, if we don't know enough yet... perhaps some discrete surveillance is in order? It isn't right for students to be in the dark about their sensei, after all- what sort of class would that be?" Her tone, though, was more playful and teasing than anything. 'Surveillance' was more likely to mean 'asking around and doing a Google search' than anything else.

It was reassuring to know others shared her bafflement at trying to draw these distinctions, and it showed. She flashed a smile to Rimma, tucking her forelock and its barrettes out of her face. "It's arbitrary. These... lines. But... prejudice always is, isn't it? The wrong color. The wrong belief. The wrong... quirk. It's stupid and arbitrary. People need excuses to let them hate. This is just the newest one."

"Oh, I didn't- mean us," muttered Arisu. "I just meant that... I didn't think simply ignoring them was the best thing to do for the victims. They deserve justice. They deserve to be avenged. Maybe they'll be judged by history, but that's not... it doesn't change the fact that they were murdered, you know?"

The idea that worrying about this worldfire being pessimistic left her shaking her head. "I don't think it's at all pessimistic. I think it's realistic. It'd... take very little inaction at higher levels to let base tensions skyrocket. And in the end... we're probably going to be the ones fighting the war against the Gifted Underground, which makes all the normals happy. The quirkists are happy we're dying, and if we win, which we... we have to. Then the righteous get to see the Underground fail. It's not -optimistic-, no, but... pessimism isn't the only alternative."

--- arisu ---

- learn or repeat -

Mentioning that students had been planning to try to do something about this mess themselves was perhaps not the wisest comment to make to the vigilante sympathizer! Rather than looked horrified or upset, Arisu immediately looked intrigued. "Really? We have students strong enough to go up against the kind of brutality we saw? Who? What sort of quirks do they have? Have they stopped any villains before, do you think?" The barrage of questions was enthusiastic in the extreme, immediately curious as to what precisely these students planned to do to push the scales back towards alignment. Rimma clarified, though, and Arisu straightened up, clearing her throat. "... well- well, of course, that's possible- perfectly reasonable, really, that everyone can do their own personal best. We just answered the questions from different perspectives, that's all."

Rimma's comment regarding the state of fragility- or lack of it, more accurately- got a sidelong, unhappy look from Arisu. She didn't seem upset, just... not excited about the situation in general. "It basically is, Rimma. Like- checks and balances only work when the entities enforcing them do so. If those entities share the same bad view you do, then just like that, you have something that looks legitimate and one hundred percent isn't. Tack onto that the general unwillingness of most people to endanger themselves or their family for someone else, and it becomes really easy to coerce an entire population into allowing atrocities out of fear for themselves. 'At least it's not me.' That's the thought that allowed Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler- basically everyone who's ever perpetrated genocide has used 'at least it's not me' to keep an otherwise good population from rising up while they slaughter millions."

Arisu shifted in her seat. She didn't like conflict, but she felt pretty strongly about this. "I know it's tempting to think, 'it's been so long. we're better now.' But we're not, we really aren't. We're still just people. Scare the population, legitimize your hate, and you have to somehow motivate an entire population who would otherwise be nominally safe to put themselves in the line of fire for a subset of people they don't belong to. It's happened. More than once or twice. Just this time, the Jews have superpowers. Maybe that'll help. I don't know. But I feel like it's just gonna make the fearmongering sound legitimate."

The girl's eyes flicked back up to Rimma. "I hope you're right. I want to be wrong. But we can't just... assume that everyone's going to stand up for us. Presuming that everyone else's decency is all the armor we need is going to get us on the front lines of a war with ourselves, or... or worse." She took a deep breath and huffed it out. "I don't think that violence is the answer, though. I think that making people aware of what COULD happen if we're complacent is the way to avoid it. That's why I'm really proud of you and Emi for making those videos. That's exactly the sort of thing we need."

--- arisu ---

- - -

"Oh." Arisu didn't do much to veil her own disappointment at the lack of forthcoming information, but she seemed more like a let-down fan than actually personally invested. "Well... that's sensible enough. I can't see the teachers condoning students in their care throwing themselves actively into the line of fire before being certified as ready to do so. At the -very- least on a professional level, and most of the teachers seem to care enough to take the same stand personally as well. I'd be lying if the idea of student heroes wasn't appealing. It sort of makes me feel like maybe I'll be able to get somewhere myself, you know? Right now I still fight with feeling like I'm treading water, going no place."

Arisu gave Rimma the floor as she addressed a few of her own concerns, and waited for the other girl to finish her explanations and analysis before speaking up. She visibly tuned in to everything said, and weighed each statement rather than rejecting them out of hand.

"So... I do have to agree that acting out of fear of other's actions is just as fear-based and foolish as anything else, but only in so far as those actions create a detriment in your life or others. Beyond that, sometimes the best time to take action to protect yourself or others -is- to act before there is a chance for things to prove themselves horrible. Sure, things might be fine if you let a teenager play with a handgun, but they WILL be fine if you take the gun away. The problem is when that mentality is aimed at people with handguns built into their very selves, so to speak- us. People want to just make us normal because it's more convenient for them if they don't need to worry about people with biological... "handguns." The way things are changing is reasonable- requiring licenses and training before publically using those "handguns", so to speak. What's scary is that if the people who think all quirks ought to be outlawed, their possessors corralled away to make the world safer for everyone else, start convincing the general population that's the way it should be. That is -so much harder- to backpedal on without absolute tragedy if you address it later rather than sooner. I know that all the preparation and worrying seems like needless anxiety to you, but if that sort of thing isn't caught, and addressed carefully, -early-, then things get way worse before they get better. That's all I was saying. I see your points, and they aren't wrong, but I feel like it's important to clarify things."

On the last point, at least, she seemed in agreement, and nodded along. "Yeah. We'll be ready if that does happen- but I'd much prefer to be the deluded maniac raving in the shadows about things that'll never come to pass than some sort of Cassandra prophesying disaster. So here's hoping I'm just as foolish as you think, huh?" Arisu tried her best to flash a smile- but truth told, she really was pretty strained over these topics, for all she did to try to glaze over them and hide the stress.

--- arisu ---

- - -

"That'd be wonderful. I- really want to get out into the community and start being a force for good. The more visible we are putting ourselves on the line to protect everybody, the more comfortable everyone will be with the idea of quirkers wandering around. Plus the more experience we get in safer environments, the better and safer we'll be in the real situations we'll face as heroes." Arisu fell quiet a moment, then spoke plainly. "Have you ever thought about that? We won't be students forever. We're training to be real heroes. The kind that go against villains and disasters. This isn't just- some manga school slice of life thing. We'll really be out there one day."

Hearing that she hadn't convinced Rimma that she was an irredeemable fool was quite relieving, and Arisu showed it with a smile. "Thanks. I don't think you're foolish either. It's not wrong to hope for the best. I think maybe it takes more strength to trust that things will be good, that people will be good. So I sort of envy you that, Rimma-san."

"Yeah, for such an unresolved disagreement, I think we really did discuss it properly. Nobody got mad or screamed- but hey," she murmured under her breath, "Maybe it's just because no boys were around, right?" It certainly wasn't a -fair- comment to make, much less an accurate one... but it seemed like a funny one! And the time for seriousness seemed to have passed, anyhow.

Arisu buckled down with her new schoolmate and focused on catching up on all the lessons she'd missed. She was quite bright and a fast study, though it became pretty rapidly clear that her aptitudes lay in creative problem solving and not sheer memorization- every time they had a vocab list or map or chart to study, her eyes glazed a bit, for all the effort she put in anyways. It was only the tactical exercise maps that she seemed to have a knack for.

In the end, when they finished, they left the library together, chatting about a few less stressful things- like ideas for some of the school clubs and a few of the interests they shared. To any eyes, it seemed like the start of a pretty healthy friendship- maybe not one build on idealistic duplication, but surely one on symmetry.

And perhaps in the long run, it would be all the stronger for it.

END