Subject: slowly now [lucent lee] 303 views

[mewt]

First steps out into the big Digital World, away from the bustle of Asuka City. Mewt felt a little like he needed to be on guard even though he was only in a park, or more accurately Central Park. With a slight gaze down to his Digimon the young man quickly realized Ritz did not share his feelings.

The Salamon was happily bounding through the grass, investigating any little thing that she could. Oddly enough she did have rather dog-like qualities. Mewt took pause, considering the thought he just had. Was it truly odd for the Digimon to have those animal-like tendencies in particular? It had never occurred to Mewt before, but it would make perfect sense for the creatures to have some animal-type programming in them.

Later he would have to find some other Digimon to observe, for the sake of a more complete understanding. It was apparent to him that Digimon were varied, this was something he had already thought of on many occasions, and just coming to understand Ritz and perhaps Nox as well wouldn't serve him properly. "C-Could we rest a m-moment?" Mewt sputtered and huffed. Even if it was just digital, he was growing weary from all of the bustling they'd been doing in the day. It was, by far, more than the young man was used to in the real world where he was confined to his home nearly all week.

Ritz looked back to Mewt curiously, but nodded and said, "Oh, alright. Just sprawl out in the grass maybe?" Leading by example, Ritz made her body entirely stiff and casually flopped to her side like it was completely natural. She remained that way for a few long moments, a blank expression on her face, until in an instant she decided she wanted to roll around in the grass like any dog might in the real world.

"You are... s-so odd," Mewt mumbled as he came to rest in the grass himself.

[lucent]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=height,350,true][atrb=width,400,true][atrb=cellpadding,10,true] So, one of these days she was gonna do something on-the-job, right? The ever-vibrant young programmer had been aimlessly wandering for a few hours now, not sure if she just wanted to play the game for what it was and maybe enjoy herself in the process. There was an air of restlessness about her as she drifted through Asuka city- it hung thick even as she had meandered through countless areas in this sector, but she had still not found a productive way to use her time. Not a bug in sight. "Moni, I am starting to think I am somewhat useless in my job currently," She grumbled the words out, not taking the time to recall enough Japanese to make her sentence a little smoother. When no one was around and she didn't need to impress she sure as hell didn't. It wasn't as if her only partner was one for long conversations anyway. In response Monimon's little emoticon face changed to, ":<" "Ah, don't get me wrong- I like the job. I like the place. I enjoy Digimon. Just want to do something for the first time. Fix a bug or something," Lee waved dismissively and continued walking. It wasn't long before she noticed an odd little Salamon rolling in the grass a short distance before her. "As weird as that little one looks, I'd venture to say that's not the bug I'm looking for..." Lee's gaze drifted to what she could only assume was the Digimon's partner. Looked about her age, really. "What's up with your Digimon?" Lee asked her question with her clumsy Japanese as she drew closer to the young man.

[mewt]

There was absolutely no hiding or denying that the voice directed at him startled Mewt a little. A slight jump and an almost frantic look to the source was the apparent reaction. Only after he managed to calm his fluttery heart a little did he realize a couple things about the person addressing him. She looked like a young woman, roughly his age if he had to guess, and her voice was... peculiar. It felt his mind straining for a few moments until he abruptly realized she had a distinctly English accent of sorts. Japanese was not her first language.

After realizing those things, Mewt promptly caught sight of the little red satellite that was hovering over her character. A staff member! For some reason it made him feel a little tense, even though he had obviously done nothing wrong. It was just an automatic response though, he knew he would calm down a little if he just spoke to her a little. Like perhaps by answering the question she had asked an awkwardly long few moments ago.

"S-Sorry," Mewt started, trying to laugh a little at how pathetically dumbfounded he must have just looked. "As f-for Ritz, your guess is a-as good as mine. I haven't k-known her long, so I can't claim to und-derstand her at all."

Blissfully unaware that she was the subject of conversation, the little Salamon continued to obsessively roll in the grass like it was the most amusing thing to do in the entire world. Mewt took a few seconds to observe her actions, still utterly confounded by the nature of Digimon and the quirkiness of the one he called his partner. Tearing his gaze from the creature, he looked back to the woman who was approaching and announced, "I-I'm Mewt."

[lucent]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=height,350,true][atrb=width,400,true][atrb=cellpadding,10,true] "Mewt, huh?" She couldn't help but admit to herself and she adored the way he had to speak so slowly, so deliberately. Hearing Mewt stumble over his words like a child trying to learn how to speak was like music to her ears. Extra time to process what was being said to her and no desperate rush to understand each little sound. Already Lee wanted to keep this boy close, as a friend. "Hey how about you go play with that Salamon why I talk to Mewt here, yeah?" Lee addressed her partner which seemed all but too overjoyed to oblige. As Monimon scuttled over to where the Salamon was rolling, Lee sauntered closer to Mewt and flopped into the grass next to him. "You don't mind if I relax here with ya for a while, right?" She asked with a slight smile. It was obvious by that point it wasn't really much of a question, but it was polite to ask anyway. "Pleasure to meet you by the by, Mewt. I'm Lucent Lee, but you can just call me Lee for short." The words were coming to her a little easier now, but it was still a bit of an effort to pick the proper ones sometimes. Japanese was a difficult language when you were coming from something like English. "You said you're new, right? How are you enjoying the game so far?" Lee questioned in a friendly tone. In the time she herself had been playing she hadn't been one for socializing exactly, so she didn't have any friends yet. Now seemed like as good a time as any to take a little break and say hello to an unfamiliar face. "Oh but before that, I'm curious about something. Your stuttering? Hopefully it's not rude of me to ask what's up there."

[mewt]

He watched silently with that slight anxiety as the woman stood there and repeated his name to herself. As far as he could tell she didn't seem to be anything but friendly, yet something in him was still so tense for some odd reason. Even as she told her Digimon to go play with his and she started to rest next to him there was the irrational fear that she might suddenly tell him he had done something horrifically wrong and he was going to be booted from the game. The thought of losing the game tore at him and remained one of his only current fears in life.

"N-No I don't mind," Mewt sputtered out the words swiftly, and perhaps a little too forcefully when he heard himself. All that anxiety was getting the better of him, he could tell. What did help was seeing her smile a bit and hearing her introduce herself. Mewt liked the tone of her voice and the way her accent tainted the Japanese words. Many others were probably rather cruel to her about it, but Mewt remained an intellectual rather fascinated with other countries and other cultures. "Nice to m-meet you too, Lee."

She addressed him being new and asked what he was thinking of the game so far. There was so much he could say about it, he could praise about it, but before he managed to organize his thoughts enough to answer she spoke again. It was odd how casually, and surprisingly enough pleasantly, she brought up his stuttering when he was sure most people were either viciously annoyed by it or were too polite to mention. In any other situation he might feel his self-esteem issues crushing his ability to say anything, but in this moment he felt... fine.

"I-It's not rude at all. Most p-people don't, actually," Mewt started with a slight smile. He was at ease, and as such he could continue speaking more confidently than he normally might. "There's a r-reason I have trouble with my w-words. Outside of the game I-I'm a mute, and I can't s-speak and never really have b-before. I hope it doesn't an-annoy you."

"As f-for the game, I've b-been playing a short wh-while and I love it. J-just being able to speak makes it s-so amazing."

[lucent]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=height,350,true][atrb=width,400,true][atrb=cellpadding,10,true] He seemed a little tense at first, but Lee wasn't gonna worry about that too much. The staff thing did throw a few people, she remembered only as some kind of side note that she had that little thing hovering to announce her to the world she was some kinda DIGI-GOD. Alright that was an overstatement, she was no god and that little red fleck didn't imply she was. It could make her somewhat unapproachable though, which was just the icing on top of the 'not Japanese' cake preventing her from getting many connections in this game at all. Mental rambling, check. During the aforementioned rambling, Lee had the pleasure of entirely ignoring a slight lull in the conversation and when she tuned back in she heard him talking about his stutter. Exactly what she wanted to know about. It came as quite the surprise though to hear it was due to his utter lack of speaking ability outside of the game. Lee had heard of cripples crying over new-found abilities in the game, missing limbs entirely replaced, but never something like the ability to speak despite being mute. Fascinating business, that was for damn sure. She listened with a rapt attention and came to a very natural smile when he was done talking. "I'm pretty glad I asked then, cause that's fuckin' amazing," Lee uttered in genuine awe of the capabilities of Digimon Online. As a programmer she probably should have understood the finer details of why everything worked that way, how it functioned at base level, but maybe that was something she would learn after being on the job a bit longer. "Oh, sorry about the language. Bad habit," She realized she cursed just as easily in the language that was foreign to her as in English. Funny. "It's certainly no bother though, the stuttering. In fact it's completely refreshing and slows your speech down enough for me to grasp it the first time around instead of needing you to repeat yourself. I got a secret for ya, don't tell nobody," Lee hushed her voice to a whisper and leaned in to say, "I'm not actually Japanese, so it's hard to understand most of the time." She broke away with a laugh and said rather openly, "It's obvious this is not the language I'm best at though, that's no secret at all. It's amazing to me that you can speak in the game at all, let alone half as well as you do already considering you said you're still new to it. Gotta love what the world is capable of these days, eh?"

[mewt]

More earnest relief flooded in the more he heard her speak. The cursing amused him, mostly because he could sense she used the word rather frequently and could speak it better than she could speak a great many other Japanese words as far as he could tell. "It doesn't bother m-me," he replied swiftly to her apology for the curse, expressing his relief and amusement on his face readily. Mewt liked this person already, whoever she really was, and only stood to like her the more she went on.

It was perhaps the first time he had heard someone in the game say his speech was no annoyance to them, and even more than that she seemed to... enjoy it. Blurry tears crept into the sides of his vision, but Mewt felt it together and didn't let her see that he might be able to cry. By the time she leaned in and whispered her 'secret' to him he was laughing to himself with the threat of crying nearly entirely banished. Mewt was almost surprised it wasn't enough overwhelming emotion to get him kicked out of the game.

"Y-You don't know how n-nice it is to hear that. T-That I'm not an annoyance. Not being a-able to say what I w-want the way I want is so f-frus-strating sometimes, for me and others," Mewt started simply, trying not to work himself up into an emotional state again. It was almost hard to resist reaching out and hugging Lee, thanking her for being who she was and not detesting his faults. "The t-truth is I like how you speak t-too. Accents f-fascinate me, but so do other c-countries, so that's no surprise."

Curiosity overtaking him, Mewt asked "Where are you f-from, anyway and w-what brought you here?" Just knowing her original language was English didn't answer enough questions for him. At the last minute the young man added, "Oh, and how long h-have you been here?"

[lucent]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=height,350,true][atrb=width,400,true][atrb=cellpadding,10,true] Something about his expressions or the way he said things really struck a cord in Lee. It was suddenly entirely impossible to be disingenuous like she knew she usually was with people she didn't know all that well. That fact was actually almost a little unsettling- she was usually so good at cloaking herself in some kind of snarky attitude. Mewt though. This kid seemed like he could use a pretty good friend, or just someone rooting for him in his life. Damn, he was kind of adorable. Contentedly quiet for the moment, Lee listened to what the kid had to say in that pleasantly slow voice of his. She couldn't help but smile a bit the longer she listened to him. Understanding Japanese was a beautiful, beautiful thing. Kicking back a little and sending a short glance to her partner that was still goofing off, she let him finish entirely before she replied at all or answered any questions. Lee got the feeling he was a pretty big bookworm, but that wasn't a bad thing. Smarts were important. This was coming from a pro after all. "Well let's see. I'll start out with the how long- I've been here like... a year about? Maybe just over a year actually. It's hard to keep track of time for me for some reason. I think it's all the coding- I get pretty involved in my work," Lee shrugged a little and pushed some hair out of her face. "On the subject of work though, that's what brought me here to Japan. I originally uhhh... I came from America. Over there I was a programmer, but I wanted to work on something more dynamic in the heart of where great games were born. It was just dumb luck I got this job though, to be honest." A slight smirk crossed her face as she remembered where she used to work. Buncha douchebags. "It's cool to hear your interest though. Some people can be pretty stuck up in this game about a foreigner invading their turf or somethin' you know? Anyway, enough about me kid- tell me some about you," She quirked an eyebrow. "You said you were a mute, but what else are you out in that big ol' world?"

[mewt]

So then she hadn't actually been here all that long, Mewt thought with a slightly impressed expression. To have learned functional Japanese in that time, which really wasn't that much time at all where it concerned learning a language, was impressive and spoke of her intelligence as far as the young man was concerned. Of course that wasn't the only thing that spoke to how smart she was, she also seemed to be intelligent enough to move countries based simply on how talented she was at her work. A programmer, she said. Mewt really didn't think it was dumb luck.

Everything he learned about her made her seem like such a good person to have around. Intelligent and pleasant, not to mention she seemed like the humorous type. A good older-sister, maybe. For a brief moment he wondered if she left any family behind when she came overseas. "It sounds r-really exciting to me. Like s-some kind of big ad-adventure. Were you ever a-afraid, when you left I mean?" Mewt looked to her face, eyebrows raised in curiosity. Even though she said enough about her and started asking about him, he couldn't contain his urge to know more. A few questions couldn't hurt, but he supposed he should answer what she asked him too.

A moment passed as he bit his lip and thought about how to answer her. "Outside... of th-the game, I'm not really a-anything special. A student, I-I suppose you could say," he started. Trying to talk to himself after hearing something like Lee being able to jump countries based on her skills alone was difficult enough, but Mewt... well in real life there really wasn't anything very special about him. "Because I c-can't speak I'm not l-looked at very favorable for... m-most entry level positions. My parents are w-well off, so money isn't a t-trouble for me at least."

"I think s-someday I want to work in a l-library. Quiet is n-not a bad thing, there," Mewt uttered, chuckling a little.