as life gets longer, awful feels softer
Who: Shin & You!
What: April Catchall... also Shin's birthday
When: April 2nd onwards
Where: Gaming, Robotics & Programming and Gardening Clubs, Shin's room, the Student Store at night, the kitchen, the library... anywhere really.
Warnings: None as yet!
It’s April 2nd! Always a kind of weird time for Shin. The timing of it - just when getting back to school - always left him the youngest in his class and made the two events indelibly linked, such that during his first and only disastrous year of university it was another thing adding to the cocktail of strangeness, isolation, loss and relief that colors what he remembers of that time.
This year is extra weird, because he’d not really thought about it until the day arrived with unexpected speed, but the death game had killed him just before it. And if he’d chosen to graduate, he’d not have reached it either… somehow, despite all the odds… he’s actually become 22 in a way he remembers. Despite all the times he’s almost died, and all the times he actually has died… he’s still here. He’s made it this far.
It’s a heady feeling that’s hard to identify, with strange shadows of giddy euphoria and listless mourning to it. It’s a time of new beginnings, so it’s said…
He’s not going to be shouting it from the rooftops, and he’s completely not expecting anything. He’s celebrated the last two alone beyond a phone call with his parents and maybe some treating of himself with a snack. He’s planning on spending the day as he normally would; checking in on the clubs he’s connected to, working or napping in his nice warm room, or in the kitchen keeping his stock of tupperware soups topped up and the like. But there’s a quiet contentedness clinging to him, like just for the day something’s been lifted from him, and you can catch him humming or whistling to himself while doing any of these things.
There’s ways to find out if you want to surprise him; at least one of his friends is the sort to look it up in a school file or know it from those vague Yogen memories and then tell others about it.
[Since this is also April's catchall, feel free to have interactions outside of birthday or event stuff here as well!]
What: April Catchall... also Shin's birthday
When: April 2nd onwards
Where: Gaming, Robotics & Programming and Gardening Clubs, Shin's room, the Student Store at night, the kitchen, the library... anywhere really.
Warnings: None as yet!
It’s April 2nd! Always a kind of weird time for Shin. The timing of it - just when getting back to school - always left him the youngest in his class and made the two events indelibly linked, such that during his first and only disastrous year of university it was another thing adding to the cocktail of strangeness, isolation, loss and relief that colors what he remembers of that time.
This year is extra weird, because he’d not really thought about it until the day arrived with unexpected speed, but the death game had killed him just before it. And if he’d chosen to graduate, he’d not have reached it either… somehow, despite all the odds… he’s actually become 22 in a way he remembers. Despite all the times he’s almost died, and all the times he actually has died… he’s still here. He’s made it this far.
It’s a heady feeling that’s hard to identify, with strange shadows of giddy euphoria and listless mourning to it. It’s a time of new beginnings, so it’s said…
He’s not going to be shouting it from the rooftops, and he’s completely not expecting anything. He’s celebrated the last two alone beyond a phone call with his parents and maybe some treating of himself with a snack. He’s planning on spending the day as he normally would; checking in on the clubs he’s connected to, working or napping in his nice warm room, or in the kitchen keeping his stock of tupperware soups topped up and the like. But there’s a quiet contentedness clinging to him, like just for the day something’s been lifted from him, and you can catch him humming or whistling to himself while doing any of these things.
There’s ways to find out if you want to surprise him; at least one of his friends is the sort to look it up in a school file or know it from those vague Yogen memories and then tell others about it.
[Since this is also April's catchall, feel free to have interactions outside of birthday or event stuff here as well!]

no subject
...
fruit and rice is a little weird, though, when it's like this. regardless, she'll take the offered seat with a pleased smile, taking one of them herself. it doesn't seem too misshapen... she knows it has a grape in it.]
I'm glad you seem to like it, Sou-kun. When I think of "fruity", you're definitely the first person that comes to mind.
[sweet and well-liked... healthy... refreshing. green on top. the rice is actually perfectly made, for the record. she has had practice there.]
What were you working on? If it's not a secret, I mean, being important and all.
PEACE YOU'VE KILLED ME INSTANTLY
Ah, I suppose I can tell you... Not sure how interesting it'll be but... You know Clamor's magic circles?
[There's a spark of animation coming to his eyes. This is the Shin that gets up in front of class and lectures (often getting sidetracked).]
Well... it's a hassle to have to sketch everything out perfectly all the time... especially if you're making a lot of little changes and need to erase things... and then you've got a lot of half-done magic circles everywhere, which is just a fire hazard... Because if you forget that it's not a working circle and you put magic in it that energy wants to go somewhere, it's like a short circuit, ahaha.
[Has he found this out from personal experience? Noooooo, shh.]
So I was thinking, what if I could just make a code shorthand for it? It still has to be drawn out to test it but... it's a lot easier to edit, that's for sure. Maybe I can make something that'll print it out, later...
[He's curious about if a magic circle on a screen is functional but also... he doesn't want to set his laptop on fire finding out either, especially given how irreplaceable it is. He gestures to the lines on screen - a lot of numbers, jumbled letters (each one corresponding to a magic script counterpart, maybe he'll make a font for it at some point) and semicolons, grouped into little labelled paragraph chunks - with one hand while he takes a small bite with the other. Huh, it's odd... but not bad at all. This rice is really good... he'll take another bite yes please.]
This one is umm... trying to make things stop in place if they go above a certain speed. That one's really easy it turns out. ['Easy' being he's needed a lot of Clamor coaching but at it's core... it's just 'if x then y'.] Ahaha, it's all the safety features that are the hard part...
[Because even with the binding spell he's tweaking being a prefab he doesn't have to make from scratch, editing it instantly creates a lot of unknown factors. There are a lot of potential horror scenarios here, like 'wrenching off whatever suddenly stops' and 'accidentally setting the limit too low', which is a problem where flesh gets involved, not to mention what happens at the circle boundary or how the deceleration affects things. You know, normal stuff. Glitches are kind of terrifying when they can actually affect you in real life... he has to wonder about those simulations sometimes.]
Testing this is gonna be interesting, that's for sure...
PERISH!!!!
she listens avidly anyway, because this is something shin is clearly passionate about and she likes that, likes learning about what her friends are into and is eager to try her hand at it too. not that this, um, sounds particularly easy to get into, but it's something she couldn't even imagine before hearing about it now. a code? that acts as a magical conduit, in a way? kaede wonders if yumeno-san would've considered it valid, or just a cheap trick in the face of Real Magic.]
You can really do that? That's amazing! I didn't really believe too much in stuff like that before I saw it here, honestly, so even hearing about it is sort of weird...
[munch... oh she outdid herself with the rice at least... when is she gonna get to the grape... it's in the center, hopefully...]
But I'd love to see it in action! Your code, and what the circle does too. I have a friend back in the school Amami-kun and I came from that was a self-professed mage, but she was more like a magician with her skillset. I think she'd probably appreciate you a lot.
[less work for her. kaede would at least agree with the girl that whatever she is looking at on the screen is gibberish, but then again a particularly hard piece would be the same way to shin. thinking about it that way, maybe she can connect the dots and understand what part goes well...]
How do you plan to test it, anyway? Is there anything I can do to help?
THIS IS REVENGE ISN'T IT
Let me guess, the Ultimate Magician?
[He's seen the pattern... he's alternating between taking bites and speaking so he's not talking with his mouth full.]
I didn't either... Weird's an understatement. Technology can do some amazing things, but magic's something else entirely, isn't it? Ahaha, I didn't even know I could do it...
[Maybe it's because he's a ghost, technically? Who knows. It was a one-two punch; Asunaro's humanlike dolls, and Yogen's magic.]
Err, that's the idea, at least.
[Sometimes projects just... hit a wall and stall. There's still that Asunaro-like AI he took a stab at making interred in it's digital grave, never born. The program for dreams he was working on for Ranger before things got complicated lies here as well. He occasionally still picks at that one... because sudden thoughts of inspiration in the shower don't care about the state of an alliance, apparently.
Help... well he does teach a class, but it's probably a lot to catch someone up on this much coding on the spot given the sense that Kaede probably hasn't dabbled in it herself much, so...]
Well... how good are you at drawing? The auditorium's basically empty in the weekend, right? Probably nobody would notice if we cleaned up the circles before leaving... then it's just a matter of tossing things in and seeing what happens.
[And standing near the doors Just In Case. Shin can stop supplying a circle that's going wrong with his own magic easily enough just by taking his hand off it, but if anything's sent zooming around by accident, that's not going to help there.]