Logs: Introducing Shinjiro Aragaki

IC Date: Late June, 2011
Who: Izo Imaizumi, Shinjiro Aragaki
Location: The Dark Hour
What: Diplomatic relations.

<Pose Tracker> Shinjiro Aragaki [SEES] has posed.

SEES had extended Masahiko and his 'people' a standing invitation to come along on a patrol or two to see what the organization was all about; and much as Shinjiro chafed at the idea of spending more time with Masahiko Irie than he really had to, he was not one to go back on promises made. When it finally happened that a mutually-favorable time could be decided upon, he had told Mitsuru he would personally lead the patrol the 'visitor' would be accompanying.

He was relieved to hear it would be this 'Izo Imaizumi' arriving, and not Masahiko.

Still, in a way, he remained wary. Imaizumi was still a relative unknown, despite his surface air of politeness. Who knew what kind of man he truly was? Shinjiro didn't have the benefit of the ability to sense Resonance, so there was no cheating in that regard.

Izo would have been told to dress and arm himself for action, and then received cordially enough at the dormitory about thirty minutes before the Dark Hour. While he is carefully kept in the lobby of the dorm-- the more sensitive operations upstairs not quite ready for foreign eyes-- rudimentary queries about the Dark Hour would have been entertained while they waited. Shinjiro himself shows up downstairs about fifteen minutes before time, and his arrival seems to be the cue for them to leave the dorm.

They're accompanied by two other members of SEES, and though Shinjiro introduces them as 'some of our more experienced members,' they still look terribly young. Not more than eighteen or nineteen.

"Normally by this time we'd already be at the door of Tartarus," Shinjiro is telling Izo gruffly, five minutes left to midnight, as they walk through the still-unchanged streets of Port Island. "But given the circumstances, we thought we'd take a little bit of a walk. You've been in it... what, one time? You must've seen the transition once then." After all, it's not exactly as if one can really walk into a Dark Hour in-progress.

<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.

If Izo's alliances didn't already set him apart from the occupants of SEES dorm, a wealth of other details would have been sufficient to do it: he's tall, broad-shouldered, older than some -- and for the most part uninitiated. The questions he asked while he waited were few and far between, but those that he summoned up the temerity to ask were all basic to a telling extreme. What sort of things had they encountered in the Dark Hour? How many times had they gone into it? How much progress had they made in taking it on?

"Sort of," he answers. In the still dusk, his voice saunters around on velvet, baritone legs, carrying with ease despite much in the way of volume. "We were parked inside of Irie's SUV. The windows were pretty dark. But yeah, that was the only time."

He lacks armor. A hooded sweatshirt over the usual attire suffices; boots that he always wears, which were designed for no other purpose than to crush waffle grids into faces. And arms? He has the two he was born with...and a heavy, anodized aluminum flashlight.

<Pose Tracker> Shinjiro Aragaki [SEES] has posed.

Izo would have gotten frank enough answers to his questions. There were things called Shadows that were SEES's primary enemy, and most of them seemed to nest in the tower of Tartarus. SEES had been trawling the Dark Hour for years, though their main focus was in exploring the tower and trying to discover how to end the Dark Hour-- and in that respect, they were nowhere near a solution.

Though the younger members of SEES hadn't reported to Shinjiro what Izo asked-- it would be rather rude to do so right in front of him-- Shinjiro already had a guess as to Izo's newness to the entire affair. And he frowns a little when Izo says he only experienced the changeover from the inside of a car. "In a car's no way to experience this shit," he says. "If it's anything to be interested in experiencing, anyway." He's noticed the lack of visible weaponry, but makes no comment the way he might fuss if an underclassman of his went around 'unarmed.'

They turn the last corner onto the street of Gekkoukan High School. The structure rises from the midst of a courtyard, looking as pristine and preppy as can be. And then the clock hits midnight. Shinjiro pauses the group to watch in silence, his head turned toward what he's already seen thousands of times.

Lighting fails immediately, anything electric sputtering to a dead halt. Any civilians in the vicinity slow, and halt, and transmogrify into gleaming upright coffins. Sometimes with unintentionally humorous effect-- two people sitting together on a bench become a pair of coffins tilted together. Less amusing are the more subtle changes, the ones that creep slowly in after the city has gone totally dark. A bilious sort of green leaks into the sky, spreading like an oil spill, the moon assuming the same malignant glow. Its green light recasts all the buildings into hulking green-and-black shapes, hunched over the bloodied streets. It had rained a little earlier, and all those lingering puddles are now pools of blood.

And the school itself? It twitches like a living thing, and starts to uncurl upward like a vine crawling towards the green moon. It warps in unnatural ways, parts of it pushing outwards in ways that defy gravity and physics, parts melting into almost-organic shapes. Multiple spires spear towards the low green sky.

Shinjiro nods towards the malformed tower. "We spend most of our time in there. Though we always have a few patrols walking around out here too. Normal people usually transmogrify, and that way they're safe; we don't have to worry about them. But sometimes they wake up. Then the Shadows get them..."

<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.

The taxonomy of Izo's expression as nighted eyes take in the blighting of the world around him is a difficult thing; no one emotion has primacy, and each feeling that contributes is subtle enough on its own that there are few threads thick enough that one could begin unraveling it from the rest. 'Wonder' does not capture it. 'Horror' is far too clear-cut. Fascination, perhaps...but if that, then of a sort as plague-ridden and sickened as the cheesy light bleeding across the strange vault of the sky.

What he does not appear to be is /afraid/. He looks down at the ground, a puddle of blood that shines blackly against the grimy green shadows, and toes it with his boot, features molding to some muted expression of grim incredulity.

Shinjiro's words echo at him along a long corridor of distraction, and when they finally arrive he flicks his gaze at this merry band's leader, nodding a little. "And become possessed?" Gesturing loosely at the pair of coffins on the bench, he angles a brow upward. "They never notice the lapse in time?"

<Pose Tracker> Shinjiro Aragaki [SEES] has posed.

Shinjiro watches Izo out of the corner of his eye. It's not unusual for those really /standing/ in the transformation for the first time to evince such varied reactions. Even Shinjiro, though he's been seeing it nightly for years and years, sometimes stops to just watch it all.

Not that he would admit to it. "Fuckin dramatic, isn't it?" is his final disparaging comment on the entire affair instead, emitting a snort as he turns and starts leading them past the coffins, past the blood, and into the courtyard before what is now an impossibly-high tower. "S'like something out of a movie or a video game. But it's our life. Figure it's cause all this-- Shadows, Personas, whatever-- is all tied to the 'collective unconsciousness' in some way, and humans are pretty fucked up in their beliefs. Or so the scientists tell me, anyway."

He falls silent when Izo asks his question, though. "No. Not Possessed. You have to have a Persona before you can become Possessed. Normal people, when Shadows catch 'em... they just get their minds eaten. When the Dark Hour passes, they're left with what the news has come to call Apathy Syndrome. Kind of like a waking coma. They just sit and stare, won't even move to take care of themselves. We try to cover as much of the city as we can, but we can't cover everything.

They're at the doors of the tower now. Shinjiro pushes them open, revealing an ornate circular lobby. At the center is a staircase, leading up to a set of double doors beneath a massive ornamented clock. "When Shadow activity goes up, so do the number of Apathy Syndrome cases. You can see them even in the waking Port Island, sometimes, before the authorities find them and take them to hospitals. They're the people you find sitting in corners of the city, gathering dust.

"As for the normal people who don't wake up? No, they don't notice a thing. Their memories are wiped too, if they wake up but don't get caught by Shadows. Time goes from 12:00 to 12:01 for them, without a hitch." He sighs, as if already tired. The atmosphere of the Dark Hour -is- thick, in a way; it drags on the soul and mind. It's obvious spending too long in it would exhaust on all levels. "Takes an hourlong detour for the rest of us."

<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.

Understatement grizzles the otherwise smooth tones of Izo's voice. His answer? "Yeah." As in, 'yeah, it is dramatic.' If this isn't, he'd be hard-pressed to think of something that is.

His position as they walk remains slightly behind and to one side of Shinjiro, which is appropriate for the condition of his presence here. For a man of his size and general physical description, he moves with studied silence. Little wonder, likely. Pushing up his sleeves, skeins of ink testify to alliances that rule him in a world where people /don't/ turn into coffins and buildings never organically change. He wouldn't, but given the company he keeps it's unlikely that those affiliations are a secret from his present company...and it's hot. The mild but sustained threads of adrenaline webbing his system may have something to do that.

"They're saying that it has, recently." Eyes like oilspills sweep about the rotunda, then wing upward along the stairs. Every part of him bristles with animal anticipation. His skin tingles. The beat of his heart raps like knuckles against the inside of his ribs. "So these people with Apathy Syndrome...they're gone for good, right? There's no bringing them back." It's a question, though it lacks the lift of inflection that would usually mark it as one.

<Pose Tracker> Shinjiro Aragaki [SEES] has posed.

Shinjiro makes no objection to Izo's choice of positioning. Despite his delinquent outward appearance he is in actuality a creature that feels hierarchy strongly: both in the sense of his place within it, and his willingness to ensure others do not step out of their places in the same. He does glance back at Izo every so often as they speak, however, if only to study this apparent 'bodyguard' of Masahiko Irie.

The tattoos are a given. Though the younger members may regard them with some interested fascination, Shinjiro has spent enough time on the street to have seen enough similar patterns on enough similar men as Izo Imaizumi. What's odd is the juxtaposition of that symbology with Izo's demeanor. Not even his appearance, really-- his appearance is pretty classic for his claimed role. His behavior, however... "Would have been ideal if Irie could come see this personally," he grumbles. "But then again maybe it's best to start with you. New as you are, you're gonna have to know how Port Island works anyway if you're gonna be active in the Five Cities area."

But Izo wants to know about the victims. "It goes up and down," Shinjiro moves on to answer, some hint of things left unspoken under the surface of his words. "Though no... Apathy Syndrome can be 'cured,' in a fashion. Not every case, but... sometimes, when we kill a powerful Shadow, some people recover. Number of cases goes down. Killing the Shadow somehow releases their souls back to them. So we spend time hunting those Shadows out too." It's... not quite the full story, but then Shinjiro doesn't want to get 'full disclosure' about the Full Moon Shadows just yet.

Shinjiro glances up at the double doors briefly as well, though he doesn't seem interested in going up to use them. "It'd be fancy, I guess, to take you in the front doors, but boring. Those go to the first floor. Weak Shadows. We'll take the teleporter." ...What?

He turns aside to a device that seems slightly out of place in all the Dark Hour's grand, macabre, and gothic design: a neon-green thing emitting a gentle hum. "You want to know how far we've got?" Shinjiro pushes a slider until it hovers alongside a block of floors that... seems awfully far from what the top of such a tall structure should be. "Step up. It'll take us up automatically."

<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.

"I just want to help," says the man with the pastiche personality, splaying his hands, and quieting to take in the answer to his question. The thought of Masahiko accompanying him on this field trip strikes him as the polar opposite of 'what is ideal,' and it may be that he thins his lips to restrain anything like a smirk that might go misinterpreted.

That the victims of that peculiar, otherworldly malaise are able to be revived is new information, not covered by his brief conversations with Naomi Suzuno, nor by Masahiko's much less substantial briefings. A shadow chisels the smooth skin between dark brows. "That complicates things, I suppose," he murmurs, half to himself.

Pulling up beside the man as he manipulates the -- teleporter? Seriously? -- Izo gives the device a skeptical once-over. It isn't that he doubts Shinjiro's veracity. If the man says that it's a teleporter, Izo is fully prepared to believe him. Rational thinking is still a difficult habit to kill, hardy and thriving in most, and particularly invasive in a person of the gangster's disposition. His arcana stubbornly reseeds it. He has yet to cultivate a garden of occult knowledge sufficient to choking out his life's more mundane undergrowth.

"It's safe, right?" The corner of his mouth twitches, but the movement fails to definitely resolve into either a frown or a smile. "I'm not going to wind up with my head on backward? Still going to be able to have kids one day?" He asks with dry humor, only half in jest...but he also steps forward, as he's been told.

<Pose Tracker> Shinjiro Aragaki [SEES] has posed.

Having Masahiko along with Shinjiro probably is not ideal for any sense of diplomacy, no. However, Shinjiro is easily read-- from even the first glance-- as an extremely direct individual, and not one to enjoy what he perceives as 'wasting time.' Why does he think it would be ideal for Masahiko to be here? So he could shove Irie's face straight into the reality of SEES and make him see it, that's why!! Izo, being somewhat more tactful, can see the obvious flaws with this kind of approach.

And though Izo may be mostly speaking to himself, Shinjiro still hears the comment in the stygian silence. He glances at Izo, brows lifting, visibly curious. "How do you figure it complicates things? Think it'd be easier if we didn't have to do the work to save them, because it wasn't possible?" He turns back to the teleporter with a sound that could be a laugh. "Guess that's true, though cold. Still, since there's a way to maybe save em, we got to take it."

He can understand Izo's skepticism, too. 'Teleporter' is a pretty hard concept to wrap a new brain around. "Safe enough," Shinjiro says. "My head's still screwed on right and the doctors ain't given me any bad news yet, and I've been using this stupid thing since... what, 2006?" There's scope for you. It's already 2011.

As promised, the teleporter does nothing untoward save emit a bright light. Upon fading, the group (minus one of the underclassmen, who was left in the lobby as a 'spotter') finds itself at some higher floor of Tartarus. What Izo may find interesting is that they seem to appear in a vacuum: there is no staircase behind them leading downward, no corresponding teleporter down, or really any indication of how to leave. Shinjiro glances at him askance. "That's normal," he says. "Only way to get back down is to find another teleporter."

He starts forward. The hallways in some respects resemble a gothic castle garlanded with the blood of a thousand gory murders, and in some respects seem to be some twisted echo of the school corridors the tower emerged from. There are occasional mirrors on the walls, and not all of them seem to throw reflections. "Now here... there's gonna be Shadows," Shinjiro cautions, "though we might not run into any."

<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.

"Find..?"

/Find/? Izo does not like the sound of 'find.' In his experience, in point of fact, teleporters aren't things that one simply /stumbles/ over, and if anything, his life of crime through association has left him with a visceral need to have an exit strategy at all times, intense enough that it verges upon proper, full-blown paranoia.

Shinjiro isn't the first to think of Izo as The Muscle, when his talents very definitely lie in other directions -- it's a wholly forgivable assumption, founded upon not just a few pieces of trace evidence. Nevertheless: arguably one of Izo's greatest strengths is his ability to hypothesize. From that intuitive facility for abstraction springs his rampant empathy, his grasp of diplomacy, his understanding of people -- their motives and intentions -- and his foresight. His imagination is a ceaseless engine, mentally driving him down paths of possibility.

It has downsides. The scenery flickering behind his eyes is ugly. Carnage in a maze of corridors, with no clear path to an exit. Theseus with no Ariadne, lost in a labyrinth and hunted by a minotaur. He sees the tragedy unfold with shocking clarity, and grits his teeth.

Thanks, brain. Thanks, for that.

He nods solemnly at the caution, and turns his thoughts away from the macabre display in his mind to shake off some of that /prey animal/ feeling. "That was only part of what I meant. About doing the work to save them, or not. Eventually, when and if you figure out how to shut this place down...you're going to have to make a hard decision. How many people do you think are afflicted right now? You'd have to cut those losses, wouldn't you? To prevent anyone else from being taken in the same way."

<Pose Tracker> Shinjiro Aragaki [SEES] has posed.

Shinjiro looks back at Izo, puzzled, at the trepidation layered in that single syllable. It takes him a minute, in which he mentally rewinds himself several years to discern what would bother a new entrant about this situation. Then it clicks.

Ah. Yes. That.

Shinjiro waves a hand in a vaguely dismissive way. It's meant to be reassuring, but probably comes off as exactly the opposite. "Don't worry, we do this every night. There's usually one every fifth floor or so. Maybe." Are they on a floor that's a multiple of five, though? "We just keep climbing until we find a way out. Anyway, if we really get in trouble, I guess the teleporter isn't the /only/ way. The spotter we leave downstairs is a last resort exit plan. They can Escape Route us out." WHY DIDN'T HE SAY THIS EARLIER

But then Izo clarifies on his meaning. Shinjiro is silent a few long moments as he continues down the darkened halls, avoiding pools of blood as if navigating this place were second nature. The silence is long enough to be uncomfortable, to cause one to wonder if Shinjiro heard or will even bother to ask. In reality, it's just a function of how deeply Shinjiro can think about an answer before he gives it. When he takes the mind to, at least.

"The hope is that when we destroy all these Shadows and end the Dark Hour, all the cases of Apathy Syndrome will recover," he finally says slowly. A staircase leading to the next floor looms before them; Shinjiro ascends it without a second thought. Unnervingly, once they clear to the next floor, the stairs seem to vanish behind them. No going back... "If we find that's not the case... if there's no choice but to suffer losses, all we can do is minimize those losses."

<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.

It would be overstating things to say that Izo /relaxes/, but a puff of breath does heft itself off of his chest, comingled with a vague sound that might mean anything, as long as it were /dry/. He trains his gaze on the man ahead of him, glacing back only once at the pair of younger figures with them.

The silence exists unmolested. Izo isn't the sort to press without good reason, and relations between he and the patriarch of SEES are fragile by proxy, given the political geography involved. He's almost surprised when the answer does finally come, and after probing it for a while mentally, sets it aside with a nod that understands the reasoning, and agrees with it.

He keeps his voice down, pretends that the building isn't changing its layout around him. The environmental betrayals are disorienting, and for someone like Izo, they seem to hint at a deeper potential for reality's unraveling. Shinjiro is familiar with the limits of those changes...but for Izo's infant acquaintence with all things Weird, vanishing stairways simply open the door to 'anything could happen.' His perception feels unreliable. It raises the hair on the nape of his neck, and terrorizes his arcana.

"There are a lot of people like you and I in this city," he says, in a tone of voice that sounds like a segue to something more. "Why don't more of them sign up to help you in here?"

<Pose Tracker> Shinjiro Aragaki [SEES] has posed.

Shinjiro watches Izo a little as they proceed, especially in terms of his reactions to the way Tartarus shifts and warps like a living thing: even with explorers within its walls. It's not an easy thing to get accustomed to, he knows, and that core of him that has entirely too gentle a nature-- in sharp contrast with his harsh exterior-- is stirred.

"S'one of those places, those situations, you can't get used to without just being exposed repeatedly. Enough to accept it," he says. His voice is overly gruff, as if it were trying to compensate for something-- as if Shinjiro were not comfortable expressing his inherent kindness without furiously covering it up. "We're trained to think of a certain kind of reality since birth... and this place works -nothing- like it."

He leaves it there. He does not even come close to explicitly pointing out Izo's discomfort. That's just not the Man thing to do.

That vague hint disappears with Izo's next inquiry. Shinjiro has a swifter answer to this question. It's clear he has a firm belief about this. "We don't take anyone but volunteers," he says. "No one is forced to risk their lives here. Other side of the coin, people are free to leave SEES whenever they want. If it gets too much for them, or they need to focus on their own lives, whatever." His voice drifts a little into something a little more insubstantial: "I left once."

<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.

Curiosity is such a difficult beast to manage. Izo flicks a glance aside at his companion when that dull gleam of past experience winks at him from the otherwise unmarked face of Shinjiro's public face. Much as he'd like to dig into it, he restrains himself from leaping directly after it like the world's most ungainly corvid, and instead takes a more casual angle.

"Everyone I meet says that they want to contribute to beating back the dark, but not many of them seem to have concrete plans. Half of the reason I wanted to see this was just to feel as though I were actually /doing/ something. Conjecture and theorizing are fine to a point, but I get impatient after a while when there isn't any traction. Every incident I've heard about or seen has ended in the same way. People get caught off-guard, even the ones who expect some sort of trouble; other people get hurt, the bad guys get away..."

He hesitates, and then slants his focus sidelong, watching Shinjiro out of the corner of his eye. "Did you get fed up with that? Is that why you walked away?"

<Pose Tracker> Shinjiro Aragaki [SEES] has posed.

Shinjiro listens in silence to Izo's relation of his own frustrations. Conjecture that goes nowhere, people without plans, mishandled situations, things gone awry. In the end, nothing changes, the bad guys get away, and no progress is made.

"It's a frustration I can understand," he finally says. "SEES has been at this for five years with limited progress. We've killed some Shadows and cured some of the Lost, but we're still far from putting an end to it all. We have an idea of what to do, but no guarantee. We have a plan, but no means to force the events we need to happen to happen faster. Mostly we're just holding steady. Like putting a bandaid on a leak in a dam. It's good to be doing -something-. But then, those actions have to take you -somewhere-."

His head turns, his gaze avoiding Izo's even as the other man tries to look at him. It's a telling gesture. "It's a frustration I can get. But it's not why I left. Reason was more personal than that." There is a pause, in which several years of regrets, tears, arguments, and bitterness can be sensed.

"I came back, though. I couldn't know and do nothing." It's not the real reason. "Point is, anyone can do the same, because I did it myself. Irie has some... strong opinions about what he thinks we are. Some kind of organized military, stamping out anything that doesn't fall in line, doing whatever we please. We tend to be strict while people are with us, sure, because we have a lot of responsibility. We can't afford things to be done wrong. But we were never about forcing people to stay at the cost of their own lives."

His expression betrays some small softening. "You saw what we have, Imaizumi. All we got are children. Neither Mitsuru or I can ask them to give up their childhood, same as we have, if they don't want to. That's why they still go to school. That's why they're free to leave."

<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.

"I don't know what he thinks," Izo says, laying the matter of Shinjiro's departure to rest. He suspects no subterfuge, though he's aware that things are likely more complicated than face value suggests -- because that's almost always true of everything and everyone. It's easier to talk about Masahiko or SEES; as a man with a host of bones and shadows he'd prefer others not go inspecting too closely on the inside of his ribs, he's prone to permitting others that privacy, too.

He doesn't look over his shoulder at the young faces behind them, but something about his posture suggests that it's an impulse he forbids himself. The young faces in that dormitory had arrived as a shock, though likely they shouldn't have. He'd been at the meeting. He'd heard that the bulk of SEES' members were students. Seeing it for himself had still come as a shock.

"He's going to have to make up his mind eventually. That's what I think. He can't be his grandfather's grandson /and/ everything that he wants to be for Sumaru. His intentions are noble, but his loyalties are divided. Less now than they will be later. If he drew the line at managing the Kagutsuchi, that'd be one thing; it's practically a mercenary band. That isn't enough for him, though. That's part of why you clash: he has ideas and doesn't trust anyone to execute them as well as he thinks he can."

Izo knocks his useless flashlight against the side of his thigh, the gesture thoughtful. "That could go for any of the groups I've met so far, though. The world, in microcosm." His snort, though soft, fills the corridor. After a beat of his own thoughts, he shakes his head. "Well, I'll help you, if you want my help. I can understand if you don't trust it. And...hey. That reminds me." Behind closed lips, he runs his tongue over the hard white crescent of his upper teeth. "There's this girl. She's a friend of Suzuno's...she's even newer to this shit than I am. She could use someone showing her the ropes. She's ballsy. She might be useful to you, too."

Pause.

"She...does have a temper," he admits.

[OOC] Shinjiro Aragaki says, "LOL" [OOC] Shinjiro Aragaki says, "YISA"

<Pose Tracker> Shinjiro Aragaki [SEES] has posed.

The other SEES members with them don't seem aware that Shinjiro is speaking of them so fondly, being a bit too far behind to hear-- which, if one thinks about it, is the only way Shinjiro could be coaxed to talk of them with such concern. He's certainly not one that shows his care easily.

I don't know what he thinks, Izo says. Shinjiro detects something about that answer that implies either a closing door-- or further elaboration. He waits, either way-- he is good at silent waiting-- and he's rewarded for his wait.

He hears out Izo's appraisal of Masahiko. Family pressure. A desire to be everything he can be, for too many people. A basic lack of trust... and a belief that no one can do things as well as he himself could. "He's gonna need to learn to back up and respect how other people take care of their own problems," Shinjiro eventually says. "And if he still wants to make a difference in this area, to everyone, he's going to have to learn about all the other groups he wants to 'cooperate' with him."

He doesn't sound scathing. Merely factual. His dislike of Masahiko, while obvious, is being audibly restrained from coloring his tone. "SEES has had a loose arrangement with the Shinsengumi in Sumaru for a while now. Nothin more than 'aid if needed, and capable of being given.' If he wants something more formal than that, he should sit down not just with me and Mitsuru, but with Tatsuya Suou and Naomi Suzuno."

He listens, though, as Izo offers his own help-- and an introduction to another. "Well, we won't refuse it if you offer it," Shinjiro says, eminent practicality in his tone. "As for this girl, well, s'not like I don't know about tempers. We'll learn her if she wants to help, too. What's her name?"