text; un: appleaday

[unaliveyourself]

goooood morning, etraya ♥

[does it even count as morning, the timestamp reads 4:27 am, what the fuck dazai.]

it's come to my attention that tatianna-san's last quest before the eggs was never actually completed! it seems like a shame to let all our hard work go to waste [those were some top-tier lies he came up with, alright, some of his best efforts!] so i was thinking it might be helpful to come up with a questionnaire to hit the ground running (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و

you can answer as many or few as you like, and remember: no pressure to be honest! we're aiming for gossip, after all~

1. do you like pineapple on pizza?

2. define 'sandwich'

3. has being here affected your powers in any way?

4. how do you pronounce gif?

5. would you confess your love with a boombox and cue cards like in love actually?

6. are you or anyone you know here dead in your own world? how can you be sure?

7. would you lick a doorknob in a public bathroom for a million dollars?

8. do you truly believe our worlds are in danger, or that echo will save any of them?

9. who's the hottest person in etraya?

10. if your world was to be destroyed but you could spend one last day there, what would you do?

Comments

[redheadedstepdad]

[ A youth! One that reminds him vaguely of a certain petulant friend of his. Shanks sounds older and weirdly British. ]

I'm struggling with "gif", boombox, and "love actually."

[ He pronounces gif with a hard G. ]

apparently i wrote half this tag and never sent it rip

[unaliveyourself]

"Gif" [pronounced, on his end, with a j] is short for "graphics interchange format", something that will only be meaningful to you if you have any familiarity with computers or modern technology, which I'm assuming is not the case.

For your purposes, all you need to understand is that it refers to a certain kind of moving image and people in my era like to debate whether it ought to be pronounced with the same sound as "garden" or "giant".

[He counts down on his fingers as he continues onto the next two]

A boombox is slang terminology for a device that plays music through internally mounted speakers, typically large ones. And Love Actually is a classic American film about the holidays.

[He lets that settle for a moment with a satisfied hum, then:]

There! Now you're all caught up for Tuesday.

[Dazai you could at least ask him if he's free--]

v understandable, it happens to me often 😔

[redheadedstepdad]

[ He listens very attentively. He indeed has no idea of what a computer is, though the dumb fighting over how it's pronounced does appeal to him very much. He misses arguing over completely inconsequential things. ]

Thank you very much. I have a follow-up question; if the abbreviation comes from the g from graphic, why would you pronounce it differently?

the struggle is so real

[unaliveyourself]

It just sounds right! Gif otherwise sounds like you left a letter or a syllable off the word you really meant to say.

[aka there's no good reason at all. it's simply a matter of preference. truly an argument over nothing.]

[redheadedstepdad]

Not sure I agree, but I suppose I come from a place with many words that don't seem to follow.

[ case in point... ]

I'm Shanks.

[unaliveyourself]

[Dazai could go off on a tangent about semiotics and the arbitrariness of signifier and signified across languages, but he has been successfully distracted by something, at least for the moment--]

Wait, wait, is your name really Shanks? Or is that a nickname someone gave you?

[He sounds delighted, in either case.]

[redheadedstepdad]

[ He suspected that'd get a reaction, Shanks isn't a common name even back home, and everyone he's introduced himself to has look at least vaguely confused by it. ]

Given name, though there's not much of a difference with my lot. My nickname would be "Red Hair"

[unaliveyourself]

No, no, "Shanks" is much more interesting. Mm, unless your hair stained red from the backsplash of shanking people, I suppose, but that's still a bit too plain...

[Normal reactions from your local totally not ex-mafia. Ahem.]

[redheadedstepdad]

That was a rumor for a while when I was younger.

[ Normal responses from a current pirate. ]

Very exaggerated, the blood rarely gets in my hair.

[ Now he's playing. ]

[unaliveyourself]

Oh, good. I would have had to think your knife work was especially sloppy, otherwise.

[Is Dazai playing? It's hard to tell.]

[redheadedstepdad]

Knives are for cooking. If I'm cutting people I usually use my saber.

[ He's not put off at all, some of his best friends stab people out of boredom. ]

[unaliveyourself]

Seems inefficient. The advantage of a knife is that it's easy to conceal. If I'm using an obvious weapon, I might as well use a gun.

[Dazai more or less joined the mafia out of boredom with life in general. But he doesn't do that kind of thing anymore, overall. That doesn't mean he won't chat casually about it, though.]

[redheadedstepdad]

Depends on the job, how fair the fight is, what kind of guns you have. Ours are the sort you need to reload often, so they're not very practical on close one-on-one fights.

[unaliveyourself]

[Odasaku could make that kind of gun work, he finds himself thinking, but then -- it's not as though he can apply others to Odasaku's standards. He wasn't one of the most legendary assassins in Japan for nothing, after all.]

Job, is it? Mercenary, or hitman?

[redheadedstepdad]

I'm a pirate.

[ Mercenary is closer, but it hardly counts when you only ever raid the government. ]

Only life I'd ever known until this place.

[unaliveyourself]

[Hmm. He's only really familiar with pirates from media, honestly; the Port Mafia very occasionally has trouble with piracy in its business ventures, of course, but it's rare enough that Dazai himself has never been called upon to deal with such an incident.]

Ohh? What's it like, do you really tend to have parrots and peg legs?? Do you say things like "arr matey" and "avast", or are those merely stereotypes?

[redheadedstepdad]

We get a list when we come of age: The accent, gold teeth, parrot, peg leg, hook, and eye patch. You have to pick at least two, otherwise you're thrown overboard.

You can pick three, but four is widely considered too greedy, even for pirates.

[ He manages to deliver without laughing, but it's still obvious he's playing. ]