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Description
Rude was just a man doing his job, but the Turk’s tenacity was admirable. Hojo was just a man doing his job as well, but still found his patience exhausted only one day into the week-long conference, when the recycled air thinned around yet another mundane presentation and forced him from the room, to breathe.

"If this is dull for me,” he said, to the shadow he had told HQ not to send, “I can’t imagine what it’s like for you. What does hybrid proteomics or the newest developments in FACS even mean to a corporate dog?”

The one that bit, but never barked. Rude gave no indication he had even heard, though Hojo’s voice rang clear in the red and yellow lobby of the Wutainese five-star hotel. They were situated on the waterfront, in a scaled-up toy harbour town garbed in historical inaccuracies, and the whole place smelled like new concrete and foreign money.

Hojo preferred the Wutai of his memories, but mostly he avoided thinking about his birthplace at all. Certainly he had never wanted to come back, to shy under the disapproving stone countenances of the Da Chao deities once more and have the River Leviathan’s gentle muttering constantly nipping at his ears. The whole country seemed to worry at him, like a disappointed parent; Hojo had long come to consider himself without origins, belonging nowhere… but now, returned, he couldn’t seem to shake the dissonance of distance from a people who wore his features, and spoke his mother tongue.

"I’m not going back in," he decided out loud, after a while. "I think I’ll learn more by visiting the local pub than staying cooped up here, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to rediscover my heritage."

A bad move, he knew, for the man commonly viewed as Wutai’s greatest traitor, but the prospect of having his throat slit in the street was infinitely more exciting than that of sitting through another speech. When he stood to leave, the scientist half expected Rude to interfere, but the suit merely shrugged, straightened his sunglasses, and fell in a step behind.

And Hojo, despite himself, was glad for the company. “I’ll buy you a drink,” he suggested, feeling lighter as soon as his feet stepped past the hotel’s sliding doors. “The Wutai White here is perfect, and deadly.”

The air was fresh, and tinted with vague, semi-recognisable scents that heightened his sense of alienation - of being a tourist in his own home town. To the north, Da Chao loomed over the architecture either ancient or designed to appear so, and Hojo paused, to take the sight in.

"Actually," he said, suddenly changing course, away from the city centre, feeling an impulse that seemed to spurn as much from dread as nostalgia, "drinking can wait. There’s somewhere else I want to visit first."

Description
Rude was just a man doing his job, but the Turk’s tenacity was admirable. Hojo was just a man doing his job as well, but still found his patience exhausted only one day into the week-long conference, when the recycled air thinned around yet another mundane presentation and forced him from the room, to breathe.

"If this is dull for me,” he said, to the shadow he had told HQ not to send, “I can’t imagine what it’s like for you. What does hybrid proteomics or the newest developments in FACS even mean to a corporate dog?”

The one that bit, but never barked. Rude gave no indication he had even heard, though Hojo’s voice rang clear in the red and yellow lobby of the Wutainese five-star hotel. They were situated on the waterfront, in a scaled-up toy harbour town garbed in historical inaccuracies, and the whole place smelled like new concrete and foreign money.

Hojo preferred the Wutai of his memories, but mostly he avoided thinking about his birthplace at all. Certainly he had never wanted to come back, to shy under the disapproving stone countenances of the Da Chao deities once more and have the River Leviathan’s gentle muttering constantly nipping at his ears. The whole country seemed to worry at him, like a disappointed parent; Hojo had long come to consider himself without origins, belonging nowhere… but now, returned, he couldn’t seem to shake the dissonance of distance from a people who wore his features, and spoke his mother tongue.

"I’m not going back in," he decided out loud, after a while. "I think I’ll learn more by visiting the local pub than staying cooped up here, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to rediscover my heritage."

A bad move, he knew, for the man commonly viewed as Wutai’s greatest traitor, but the prospect of having his throat slit in the street was infinitely more exciting than that of sitting through another speech. When he stood to leave, the scientist half expected Rude to interfere, but the suit merely shrugged, straightened his sunglasses, and fell in a step behind.

And Hojo, despite himself, was glad for the company. “I’ll buy you a drink,” he suggested, feeling lighter as soon as his feet stepped past the hotel’s sliding doors. “The Wutai White here is perfect, and deadly.”

The air was fresh, and tinted with vague, semi-recognisable scents that heightened his sense of alienation - of being a tourist in his own home town. To the north, Da Chao loomed over the architecture either ancient or designed to appear so, and Hojo paused, to take the sight in.

"Actually," he said, suddenly changing course, away from the city centre, feeling an impulse that seemed to spurn as much from dread as nostalgia, "drinking can wait. There’s somewhere else I want to visit first."