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Nothing concrete to do with the town.

[The things he's been taking care of recently have been of a more personal nature, and the next main thing on his agenda is to track down this girl that Martin claimed had been the one to erase his memory. Not something he wants to bring up now.]

Quit talking plans and information, you're meant to be takin' it easy.

[Jeez, this guy doesn't get how to relax, does he?]

[he makes a face, slouching against the cabinets, keeping himself propped up by his hands on the edges.]

I can talk about doing things without actually doing them, you know... But if that's not allowed either, then what is?

[He frowns as the conversational onus is passed to him once more, floundering.]

Poker.

[It sort of comes from nowhere, deep in the recesses of the foggy bits of his mind. He thinks he remembers how to play poker.]

Do you have cards?

Eh-?

[nowhere, indeed. Manabu stares at him for a beat, then blinks.] Uh, I...I don't actually know. I mean, I don't, but somewhere in the house? Maybe? I can look...

[Bucky shifts and, although his expression remains in his usual neutral stoicism, he's practically radiating awkwardness.]

Unless you have a better plan? I'm not-- I've not done this before.

[Just socialised. No real plan in mind.]

No, no, it's fine. [Manabu pushes away from the counter, glancing around the kitchen. he rubs at the back of his neck, gaze trailing off to another room.

while nodding:] I'll have a look around. I may as well get a better sense of what's in stock here anyway, if I'm really stuck here for a while, huh?

It's for less than twenty four hours, you're not in jail.

[He snorts, a tiny crack of humour finally showing through the awkwardness. Seriously, it's not like he's stuck here, this is his house and he has to relax for less than a day.]

I meant the town in general! [it's called from a room over, as Manabu's already on the move. seriously, he can't really sit still in a place like this! it goes against everything his brain keeps telling him to do or try! at least rummaging can help satisfy some of those anxious, nagging voices for a bit...he just has to not listen to the ones decrying this as a horrible waste of time and resources.

maybe...just focus on instead that someone's actually going out of their way to make sure he's fine? like, needlessly so? it's weird. James doesn't even come from the same place, so there's really no homeland obligation to look out for him, and considering how much he protested so much as basic conversation at the onset...

Manabu pokes around the shared living spaces, his focus on deck of cards to keep from getting distracted by some of the weirder knick-knacks.

...like the really weird, lumpy hat near one of the doors. Amara doesn't strike him as a hat-person, so it must be this elusive other tenant's? who knows.

books, miscellaneous office supplies, a bucket of old gardening gear...some funky board game, he thinks? oh--no. it's a jigsaw puzzle, apparently. eh.]

Here.

[Manabu returns after a while, putting the boxed deck on the kitchen table, sliding it in James' direction as he moves around to plop down in the seat opposite.]

I'm not really good at this one, [shocking.] but I know the basic rules.

[He has enough time while waiting to really feel how weird this situation is.

He's spent the last few months, both at home and here, hiding from everyone. Keeping his interactions with people purely superficial, being the ghost that he was trained to be. He's forgotten what it was like to have a friend, if this can even be classified as that, and social interaction just for relaxation sake is alien to him. He's probably the worst person to be trying to help keep Manabu distracted at home.

When the cards are put in front of him, he slides the deck out into his metal hand slowly.]

I think I remember the rules. It's been a long time.

[That's an understatement if ever there was one.]

I think-- I remember betting for cubes of sugar.

[oh, right. bets. this is way more David's thing than Manabu's. he makes a soft, thoughtful sound at that, looking around at some of the upper cabinets in the kitchen. he could maybe find something to that effect? or grab that box of colored paper clips he saw while he was rummaging. or--]

Oh, hang on. I think I still got something... [he sits up in his seat, digging around in a couple of his pockets, before producing a small handful of metallic coins, about eight or nine, embossed on one side with a woman's face.

he lets them slide out of his hand and onto the table.]

Ables. Will these work?

[He reaches over and picks one up, turning it over in his fingers to look at the image of the woman. She looks sad...]

This is currency from your home?

[He pulls four of the coins towards himself and pushes the other four towards Manabu, and if there's a spare one then it'll get set to one side, in an implicit agreement that they'll do fine for betting with.]

Aa, yeah. Well-- [he puts his share in a little stack.] More like, from most everywhere. It's like a universal currency, so you don't have to keep changing money planet to planet. Most places that want outsiders will take it. And if not...[he shrugs.] At least the stations will, so if you have a few, you at least won't starve until your next train.

Who's she?

[He nods down towards the woman embossed on the coin. She must be someone important if she's on the currency for multiple different worlds, after all.

He starts to shuffle, slowly at first and then faster as the muscle memory catches up with him. His left hand is bulkier than his right, but it doesn't seem any less dextrous even for more delicate movements like card shuffling.]

Huh? [Manabu blinks, then looks down at the coins.] Oh, uh...That's Queen Millennia. She's not actually queen or anything -- I mean, not right now. She lived like a couple hundred years ago. Old history stuff, back when people were mostly still on Earth.

There was a Queen of Earth? How'd that happen?

[The Earth he knows would never be so united as to march under one banner. Each country is far too territorial and proud for that.]

[he shakes his head.]

Not Earth. A planet called La-Matel. Queen Millennia was an La-Matellian who was sent to Earth as an operative, to prep it for culling. But she grew to love the planet and its people, and instead of working to help destroy it, she fought to find a way that both planets could co-exist.

The real details don't get talked about much, but she's kind of like...um. Kind of folk hero-ish? Like the kind of story you tell kids when they're young, with lessons about overcoming differences and teamwork and stuff. That sort of thing.

And like a lot of fairy tales, the I heard the real thing winds up being sadder than the story that gets told.

[Huh.

That makes a lot more sense, though it makes his skin crawl to think of anyone coming to 'cull' the Earth. Obviously it had never happened, not since there were humans now in every part of the galaxy, but it's still an unnerving thought.

He deals five cards to each of them almost absently.]

Will you tell me the story?

[Since he's sort of decided that Manabu is going to be someone he keeps around, he may as well try and learn more about him.]

Mm, let me think... [and also squint at the hand. what combos were good again?

...none of these, probably. ah, well. nothing really to lose, so he doesn't sweat it.

Millennia...man, it's been a while since he thought about that story, back when his mom told it to him and Mamoru.]

I'm...pretty sure the parts about her being sent to Earth in secret and being raised by humans is right. It's the stuff afterward that kind of gets shrugged off.

But, yeah. La-Matel turns out to be a planet with this really weird orbit structure, where once every thousand years -- the millennia part -- it swings back into the Earth's solar system, behind uh... [he squints.] The tiny one. One of the orbits on the far end. I forget. And anyway, for some reason, the next orbital swing was going to send the planet smacking right into Earth. The La-Matellians sent a bunch of their kind to Earth to hide there and grab a bunch of humans for servants before impact, then use them to, like, cultivate some other planet the La-Matellians could own? Something like that. Aliens seemed to do that a lot to Earth...

[he looks up briefly in thought.]

Mm, so the part after the whole...deciding to help save both planets instead of destroying the Earth is what I think gets cut out. About how Queen Milennia left with La-Matel, and it became a place of machines. Its people gave up flesh and blood to live on as robotics, kind of like how humans who go out to Heavy Melder do.

[he looks back toward James.]

I think...a lot of people who grew up hating machine men got hung up on that more than, like, my Mom or whoever else just liked the parts about teamwork and stuff. Even now, people leave Earth hoping to get new bodies, and sometimes folks give them a hard time for it.

[It's an interesting story, and he can definitely see how it has the elements of a fairy tale about it, but then it takes a sharp turn sideways in a way that he's not expecting. Humans going to give their bodies up for new ones? Robotic ones?

What the hell?!

The cards bend slightly as his metal fingers tighten.]

Why would they do that?

[No, that's not exactly the right question. He can maybe understand why some people might want a new body, if theirs is defective or wracked with pain. It's probably just his own issues with humanity and being altered peeking through.]

[the curling of James' fingers go unheeded, especially since his expression remains in its pretty typical scowl. Manabu's not too terribly cognizant of human-robotic issues, being of a hale and whole body, and his android crewmates looking especially human compared to, say, some of the railway conductors with their metallic faces with odd configurations.

so when he answers, it's with a shrug and a dubious look.]

I guess to be maybe more durable. I mean, metal bodies won't wear down as fast as regular humans will, even with the best medicine around. Or they want to live somewhere humans really can't. There's some really extreme places out in the universe, after all.

[on his turn, he sets a card down, and Elle doesn't even pretend she knows how to play poker.]

Prosthetics aside, I think a lot of people just...really want to live as long as they can, no matter what. Even if it means looking different.

[Would Steve have chosen a mechanical body over his own asthmatic form if it had been an option? Possibly a stupid question, the idiot had chosen to have a dangerous medical procedure to put him in a new body, that's not so different than taking a wholly mechanised one.

Still, the implications of that being possible make him uncomfortable in ways that he would struggle to articulate.]

...is that why you weren't surprised to see my arm?

[It sounds like people with metal parts are a lot more common where Manabu comes from.

He lays down two of his own cards, and then deals one more to Manabu and two to himself, to replace the ones put down. Then, after a momentary glance, he pushes one of his coins to the centre of the table.]

Mm? [blink.] Aa, I guess so. I mean, knowing what I know now...it's not very common where you're from, is it? [and perhaps part of making him a vehicle for Nazis to do their thing.

his attention drifts to the table, then to his cards, then...elsewhere.]

Someone I met early on when I joined the SDF...he'd changed a lot of himself, I think. I don't know if he did it by choice, but he'd even augmented his metal arm to form as a kind of mini-cannon.

[he slides one coin over to meet the two already there.]

Not everyone gets a say in what happens to them.

This is the only one where I'm from.

[As far as he's aware, no other prosthetics even come close, but that's because most other people developing prosthetics are interested in things like morality and ethics. It's so strange to think of a place where they're commonplace, where people can make an arm even more of a weapon by customising it so drastically.]

We don't have that kind of technology. I guess-- maybe we'll get it in the future though, huh, if you're any indication?

Maybe. I mean, if you already got aliens knocking on the door, you might be there sooner than you think! [necessity and strife tends to breed progress, after all. not that strife is a good thing to look forward to or anything.

on a brighter note:] But that'd mean you could maybe get to see space for yourself! That'd be pretty lucky.

[His lips curl up a little into a smile, though he doesn't really realise it. There's more of Bucky in him than he knows, and the man who used to buy dime store science fiction novels would love to go into space some day. His accent changes ever so slightly too, more of a Brooklyn twang threading through his word.]

Wouldn't that be something? You know, they hadn't even put a man on the moon when I was a kid.

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