Welcome to Gaia! ::

Whoever had been passing Serandite rumors about Uranophane had clearly been using the wrong pronouns.

There was someone in the other room, and it was undoubtedly the "Captain with the glowing goggles," but this person was just as flat-chested as Serandite was, and sporting handsomely chiseled features to boot. They weren't even carrying themselves in a way that came off as very feminine, and that was all without mentioning those hands. The gloves might have been adding some size and shape to them, but still.

Uranophane's gaze canted towards the door when she heard someone come in, and she'd turned fully around when her name was called. With a momentary raise of the brow, she began, "You must be Captain Serandite, correct?" She couldn't imagine it could be anyone else -- just as Serandite had heard about Uranophane, Uranophane had heard a few things about the bunny girl. "Is there something you need me for, Captain?"

The room -- and really, the subspace in general -- was somewhat teeming with youma of all kinds, lurking alongside the walls like surreal, semi-living art displays, waiting to be used. Fortunately for the more anxious among the Negaverse, they tended to stay put and out of the way of anyone trying to navigate through its halls. There was one, however, that followed Uranophane around somewhat closely, making an unusual clockwork-clicking noise as it moved: it had a hairless humanoid head and armless torso, and the rest of it could only be described as some sort of mechanical centipede.

The Captain's lips twitched a tad at Serandite's slip of the tongue, but she didn't react much to it otherwise. She was sort of used to that sort of thing, and even if she wasn't, she was still assisting a senior officer and had little interest in slipping up.

Unless she happened to be dealing with Hematite.

Then it was sort of worth it.

A pen and clipboard popped into her hands, and she flipped a couple of pages out of the way before starting to thoughtfully tap away. "You say its performance has been slipping," she paraphrased. "What... have you been feeding it?"

Uranophane's expression grew more quizzical by the second, as Serandite listed off the variety of foods she'd been stuffing her poor companion with. The exchange was all being scribbled away into her clipboard, and at one point she made a small series of very emphatic strokes -- she must have been underlining something a few times, judging by the motion.

That done, she looked at the youma again for a moment before speaking: "There's a couple of reasons why a youma can get like this, Captain. One of the more common ones is that it was just made by a bad star seed, and was bound to unravel eventually... sometimes the Chaos binding doesn't go perfectly, and that makes it unstable. Either way it's a good idea to not get too attached to them, since besides those reasons there's no telling what may happen in the battlefield."

Then Uranophane looked up at Serandite again, her murky eyes narrowed in a guarded, over-professional fashion. "However, as far as your case is concerned... did you consider for one second I may have been asking you a trick question?"

"What's the point?" Uranophane parroted, an eyebrow cocking expressively, almost as if on a cue. "The point of a trick question is to see if you're paying attention, to both the question and the subject matter involved." The pen was tucked behind an ear and she walked a couple of paces around until the hellhound was between her and Serandite, her own monstrous charge following close behind and glaring blankly at the other officer from behind her shoulder.

"The subject matter was the care of your youma," she continued. "The question was what you feed them, and the correct answer was that you don't feed them anything at all, Captain."

Her clipboard and pen vanished from her hands with another pop, and she folded her arms behind her back. "You seem to have made a misconception about what these creatures are for," she continued, a tiny hint of a scowl evident on her features. "They don't need to be 'cared for.' They don't need to be pampered or fed. They don't need anything besides orders to follow, Serandite, because youma are not pets. They are tools."

Uranophane's hands balled into tighter fists behind her back and Serandite could see the movement of her eyes -- to the hand providing even further pampering to the youma, she noted with a deepened scowl, and back to Serandite's face, which was clearly showing her growing distaste. The feeling was mutual. Uranophane thought the other Captain's uniform spoke volumes of the person wearing it: frivolous and childish, and inconsiderate of the disciplined collective of individuals the Negaverse was supposed to be.

"You came to me with concerns about the perfomance level of your youma, Captain," she practically sneered, drawing herself up to full height and generally just about to make herself into a caricature of everything Serandite disliked about her with her demeanor. "If you didn't want your treatment of it to be my business, then you should never have even come to ask me about the matter of the first place. Or, you should at least have been prepared to hear an answer that you weren't going to like."

Her eyes narrowed, the corner of her mouth fluttered, and her teeth clicked a bit in her mouth before she continued. "Besides that, General-King Charonite -- and now Queen Beryl -- created these tools with a specific purpose in mind. By going outside that purpose you have not only effectively disobeyed your superiors, but undermined them, your allies in the Negaverse, and the ideas we stand for. Is using it for cuddles and playtime really worth that to you?"

Uranophane's eyes strained in protest within their sockets as she exerted the very last iota of willpower she had against rolling them. Leave it to this brat to want an easy way out of her problems, she was just like all those people her father always complained about when he was home from work, who were after a simple solution when what they really needed was a change in their attitude or lifestyle.

"If that's the case, and you no longer have any questions for me," she said, "I believe you know where the door is. I have more work to do."

And she flipped a couple pages in her clipboard and turned away from Serandite, making a spectacle out of busying herself in the hopes she would get the message.