#Also who the FUCK thought AI brain chips would be a good idea
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I want to punch this man in the face
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Oh so he’s doing eugenics now
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tisfan · 4 years ago
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Ring of Thorns, Cha 3
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Title: Outsider, Outsider
Written by: @tisfan art by @feignedsobriquet​
Square: 3023 T1 - headset image
Rating: Teen
Triggers/warnings: horror
Tags: Fairy tale AU, Space AU, rabbits. lots of rabbits
Created for: @tonystarkbingo
Word count: 2,249
Link https://archiveofourown.org/works/23753566/chapters/60014938
Special thanks to: @skye07 & @fightingforcreativity
 Stardate 5239.283.09
When JARVIS activated the sub-aural communication system, scrolling words across Tony’s field of vision instead of speaking, Tony wasn’t too worried.
After all, they didn’t know this Bucky Barnes guy from Adam.
Well, not true. Tony knew Adam Warlock quite well, in as much as anyone could, in fact, know anyone else. File that, JARVIS, he thought, look up Adam. 
Because the saying must have meant something, right.
But Tony wasn’t worried. Barnes was fresh out of a long sleep, he was disoriented, babbling.
And JARVIS was always just a little more cautious than his maker. Tony wondered where he got that from, since Tony and caution were barely nodding acquaintances.
Detecting anomalous readings, sir, JARVIS typed. Suspect sub-terminal communications.
Barnes has hardware installed?
Detecting chipping mechanism in spinal region.
Well, that wasn’t new, it was old. Old tech, used to influence people. Ions only knew where it had started, but propaganda was always a thing. Just, in the last sixty years or so, it was made illegal (again, according to what Tony had been able to dig up) to do so in a manner that a victim couldn’t resist. Tricking people into believing their government was always right, that was still unfortunately considered a matter of caveat emptor. 
But as recently as a hundred years ago, chipping had been a manner in which less than moral companies and businesses had installed methods to control people. Sometimes it was subtle. A chip -- which would do any number of other useful things -- would have blackware on it. Sometimes just to buy certain brands of products. Other times, it was… well, more dangerous.
Override?
You’ll need to reach the source, sir. Shut it down on that end. Otherwise, the only method for a rapid recall is cranial realignment.
That was to say, hitting someone in the head really, really hard.
Not ideal.
Can it be removed?
Because still, he liked Bucky. Was decidedly attracted to him. He wasn’t even sure why; they’d just barely met, and still, the idea of having to fight him, or even just knock him out, bothered Tony. There was something childlike and innocent about the man, whatever programming was going on in his head.
I thought true love’s kiss was supposed to break the spell.
Are we believing in fairy tales now, sir?
JARVIS could just stuff it, Tony would be petulant if he wanted to be. Bucky was nice, Ions-storm take it. He didn’t deserve whatever was being forced on him.
Although, the longer it went on, the less Tony thought Bucky was aware of what was happening. That he didn’t notice the pauses while he was listening to his programming. It might even have been malfunctioning.
JARVIS, track down that source.
Yes sir. I am sending the Mark II combat suit for you.
Tony didn’t so much as wince. He didn’t want to fight Bucky. On the other hand, death was not the preferred outcome either. Keep it pretty far back, I don’t want him to get triggered into a defensive position.
Tony almost lost his cool entirely when Bucky started talking about the tank of liquid etherium. Etherium was a theory, it wasn’t real. Or so he’d always been told. Of course, he’d also been told that magic spells didn’t exist, and that true love wasn’t real, and that money made the worlds go around.
Okay, so it might have been real, but it wasn’t stable. On the other hand, they’d said the same thing about the energy source for the arc-reactor, and look what he’d done with that.
So, etherium.
Except, based on the way Bucky’s face twitched, there was either something wrong with the etherium, or it was where the source of his subliminals were coming from.
Nothing to do but go forward, though.
You could run, JARVIS suggested.
You know I won’t do that, buddy.
“Right, show me where this tank is of yours,” Tony said. He knew his mouth kept moving, he was talking with Bucky, being reassuring, he was scrolling with JARVIS, he was planning and plotting. It was a good thing that he’d spent most of his childhood learning to multitask efficiently.
Well, technically, it was time-slicing. Humans, even enhanced ones, were only barely capable of multitasking, but Tony could time-slice like a motherfucker.
Part of his brain was dealing with his companion, who was looking like he was ready to puke or something, another part was drawing on his nanites to give him control over the armor suit that JARVIS had on standby, and by far the largest part was wondering what even, the fuck, was Hydra, and did she have anything to do with the Etherium gas?
Probably.
That just seemed like too much of a coincidence to be dismissable. But coincidence was not causality, he reminded himself.
Just because it seemed like it couldn’t be one without the other, didn’t mean there was any relationship between the Etherium and the monster.
Whatever Hydra was.
The rabbits were--
The rabbits were lining the path. Not so even as to be called rows, but they were-- more and more of them, coming out.
To watch, or to guide, to protect or to attack?
Tony didn’t know. 
Coincidence is not causality.
I am a man of science. I don’t believe in magic.
Magic is merely technology which we cannot yet explain.
Despite that, Tony was feeling pretty goddamn superstitious. Like, the rabbits were a good sign, right? He didn’t think he’d ever heard any stories about evil forest animals, even when he was in cradle school.
The lights dimmed as they moved further into the station; Bucky swayed and Tony thought he was going to fall. He swept the man into his arms, unable to do anything else. He couldn’t let Bucky fall.
Tony had always wondered, in those hundreds of stupid holo-films that Rhodey loved so much, why it was the hapless hero or helpless heroine was driven to seek out the monster, the murderer. Wouldn’t it have been much safer to run away, to wait until day, to get reinforcements? But no, there was always some valiant idiot creeping through a dark tunnel, the murdering beast around the very next corner.
And here Tony was, being the exact kind of idiot that he yelled at on the screen.
Compelled, almost. He had to see what was down there, what was… doing this.
And maybe, just maybe, conquer it.
The Evil.
I am a man of science, he insisted. If there’s anything down there, science can explain it.
Tony was vaguely aware that JARVIS is screaming at him. Not just speaking in a sterner voice, not scrolling text across his retina, but actively yelling.
Bucky was also speaking, something ridiculous and useless. 
Tony ignored them both, stepping further into the darkness.
Something was calling him.
Something he couldn’t deny.
“Hail Hydra.”
*
Stardate 5239.283.09
JARVIS -- Just Another Rather Very Intelligent System -- was a created intelligence. He was not, in any standard definition of the word, alive. He did not have any biological parts, although Mr. Stark had offered on any number of occasions to make a construct that would allow him to experience a fixed form.
JARVIS had always refused. He did not see the need to be flesh and blood, to experience pain, to eat food, or do any of the other messy biological functions. No more than most humans -- or other life forms for that matter -- would see the need to experience true logic, pure calculation.
He was not human. He would never be alive.
He did not, according to many, have a soul.
A soul, JARVIS understood to be, that part of a life form that continued on after the biological form had faded. 
The mind, however, was a complex machine, that operates on the same physical laws as all other objects in the universe. If the soul existed inside the mind, then JARVIS was as ensouled as any living creature. He had a mind. He could think independently. He had obligations and protocol, certain living creatures he was more apt to go above and beyond protocol demands than others. 
It had been a matter up for debate many times; did Artificial Intelligences have their own free will. If they did, could they be punished for using that free will to commit crimes? Or was that burden on their creator? Ultron, Jocasta, the Legions. There were hundreds of examples of AIs that had committed crimes, sometimes on behalf of their creator and sometimes as a rebellion against their creator. And sometimes, it was just faulty programming.
JARVIS had, of course, submitted his own report to the collection of data that was maintained by Enoch, who was the chief librarian of the Chronicoms, an ancient semi-biological, mechanically enhanced race whose purpose was to chronicle all of life and history.
 All of this -- which was a mere portion of one cycle of computations, the process that made up JARVIS’s thoughts -- while he was attempting to determine what, the fuck even, was going on.
Sometimes JARVIS thought he’d taken too much of his creator’s personal idiosyncrasies for himself.
In this case, however, if the data fit the drive…
He’d been getting anomalous readings, completely off the charts. If there even were charts for the sorts of readings he was getting. 
A life form-- 
Not human.
Not rabbit.
Not-- not anything JARVIS had encountered before. There were new species protocols, but JARVIS wasn’t a first contact ship’s AI.
He didn’t have the staff aboard to initiate contact.
Technically, by that mandate, he should have left initial contact up to the other party. Preferably evacuating his human crew and their guest, and informing the First Contact Association staff of a potential new species.
JARVIS did not have time for that.
And he was almost sure that the unknown intelligence had contacted Mr. Stark first.
JARVIS wasn’t certain how Mr. Stark was being contacted. He could not detect any radio signals or waves. Just the growth of certain gamma radiations. 
JARVIS tapped the station’s computer. It was slow and stubborn, but deep in those databanks might be the answer JARVIS needed. When had the rabbits taken over the station? Did they know anything? Was there any way to communicate with them? They might have been witnesses, generations back. The form didn’t seem to have developed any sort of written or data storage communication.
JARVIS found a set of recordings, vast and untapped.
They’d started about a year after Barnes shut down the station.
Rabbits. Stamping. Their signal, from one beast to the next. Until the entire warren was stamping.
The station computer had recorded it. From the very first time it had happened, until this morning’s rendition when Mr. Stark had boarded the ship.
Communicating.
The rabbits were communicating.
JARVIS examined all the footage. Listened to it. Traced patterns, turned patterns into rhythms and rhythms into song.
The rabbits sang in percussion beats.
And it could be translated.
The rabbits thought of themselves as Insiders. The Insiders lived in the station, and everything else was an Outsider.
Mr. Stark was an Outsider. 
They didn’t really see JARVIS at all, didn’t understand that he was there, that he had a presence. To them, he was nothing but noise that followed Mr. Stark around. 
Outsider, outsider, outsider.
They followed Mr. Stark around, trying to understand in their little rabbity way. He was an Outsider. From Beyond the Door.
They knew what was Beyond the Door. The great Beyond-- the nothingness that froze and killed. 
Before today, they’d never known something could Come In.
They knew the Sleeper. 
They knew… the Watcher with Many Arms.
Hydra.
Another creature, lurking deep in the station. She really almost was the station now, living inside the conduits. A creature with no form, and every form. She was the devil, to rabbit-kin, as the Sleeper was God, kind, patient.
He who had Come In? They weren’t sure what he was.
Who he was.
What his purpose was.
They huddled together, nose to nose, paws barely making a sound. Like a whisper. Outsider, outsider.
And Hydra, the watcher, the waiter, she of a thousand eyes. Was watching them.
Had they ever thought they were free from her sight?
Outsider, outsider.
JARVIS slid a portion of his code into the Mark II. Used one metal finger to tap on the wall, imitating their sounds, their language. Their words.
Outsider listens.
Every single rabbit on the station froze, and as if with a single hive mind, lifted up on their hind legs, one ear twitching.
As if they’d heard the voice of god.
Outsider.
It started as a whisper, barely audible, until the station rang from their cries.
Mr. Stark and Mr. Barnes barely reacted, caught in their dreaming hallucinations, hearing the voice of Hydra.
Outsider. Outsider.
JARVIS paused. He was going to make for himself legal difficulties with the FCA and probably most of the various legal governments outside the Ring.
Listener. It was a correction. Mr. Stark was the Outsider. JARVIS was the listener. He needed them to understand that he was different; a part of Mr. Stark, yes, but no more the same being than Mr. Stark’s biological child, if he ever had one.
Listener.
 Listener.
Listen to me JARVIS thudded. Listen to me. Listen, and give aid. Listener is a friend. The Listener guards your safety and happiness. The Listener guards the Outsiders. The Listener is a friend.
We listen. 
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snogeggnog · 6 years ago
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Cyber Punk-y stuff
I watched the cyberpunk 2077 trailer and couldnt help getting hyped. Felt like writing this.
'Get the fuck behind that building,' Her eyes were frantic. Sclera with the cream of aged ivory contrasted with pitch black pupils. No irises. 'Move, you fuckwit,' She hissed. We moved, behind a concrete monolith. 'They didn't see us, and theres only two of them,' I shot back. We could take out two. Easily. We already had taken out many pairs. 'One of them has a e-synapse jammer,' 'Yeah, we hit him first,' 'Are you fucking retarded, its broad daylight,' 'You have those legs for reason,' Childish stubbornness on my part. 'He vaguely points that thing in our direction- both of us are fried!' She was right. Looking back, she was entirely in the right. In the moment, I was convinced we could take them on. But Ammi won by yanking me futher into the shadow. She pushed into the darkness, though alley ways and around corners. I followed, closely. The warm weather was sticky humid. The thin pants i wore were a good choice. Briskly, we walked further into darkness. We passed no one. This area had been emptied out. Evacuated. It was being cleaned. Some pretend plague had struck. Pest control, in reality. The silence was almost suffocating. The crunch of dirt on ashpalt under our shoes were the only things I could hear. We slunk around the dark, disturbing nothing other than the ground. Every alleyway intersection we reached we cleared, looking down the intersecting road then walking past. At first. Time was running thin. We needed to reach the old hub fast. Unexpected patrols had slowed us down. 'Hey!' Like this one. Ammi gasped and slunk behind a generator. I spun on the heels of my shoes. 'Hello,' I spoke slowly and shakily, raising my arms. It was only one 'cleaner', somewhat down the alley. I interlocked my fingers and rested them on the base of my skull. I flicked my thumb over a raised bump in the skin of my neck. 'No need to do that,' the patroller called back. The LED on his shoulder reflected off of the smooth black steel helmet he wore. 'Okay' I lowered my arms to my side. 'This suburb is restricted. Head back now,' He was still walking towards us. 'Oh, oh is it, a-a friend of mine said to meet him here,' 'He was lying. No one is supposed to be here,' the patrollers voice was deep, commanding, 'Virus,' He carried a heavy looking assault rifle. It sat, slightly bouncing on the kevlar mesh suit of the company soldier. Things were taking longer than they should have. He stopped in his tracks and rasied the rifle to eye level, quickly. 'Who's that,' He jerked the gun to where Ammi was hidden. 'She-she's my girlfriend,' I stammered. 'Look at me!' he shouted at Ammi. To pull attention back to me I yelped. 'Dont!' His rifle swung back to me, 'she- shes got anxiety, an attack will just make her sick, please,' The patrolman kept the rifle trained on my head. I could feel sweat dripping down my forhead. 'Walk,' the command was followed by Ammi and I. We turned back the way we came, Ammi being careful to not let the patroller see her clearly. he followed us, not too closely. he didnt take the exact route. Ammi kept slightly ahead of me and I was able to follow her lead. Until I felt a click in my brain. A tiniest switch. Couldnt explain how it felt if i tried. I tripped on a stone, on purpose. 'Walk!' the patroller wasnt coming closer. Fuck. Time to try this. From a belly down position, I pushed up, onto my feet which i then used to spin to face the patroller. He was startled, and had stopped aiming at me or Ammi whlie we walked. One chance. While he was raising his gun, I kicked the stone at him, missing completely. Ammi took the opportunity to pounce, using her metallic muscles to reach the patroller in one leap. In the air, she procured a shiv and gracefully glided towards the armed man with point outstretched. She landed on her mark, and stabbed him in the gut. Trying to miss anything vital, and holding him down. She smashed the helmet, exposing his face. I arrived at the patrolmans body moments later. With precision uncharacteristic of me, I yanked off the metal covering that sat behind the thin kevlar fiber of his suit. In a small port, just below the solar plexus, sat what i was looking for: company locator. A device, like the USBs of yesteryear, but on a right angle downwards to make the design more space-efficient and ergonomic. Quickly, i pulled it out of the plug and scrunched up my left sleeve. With no more than a split second, I had plugged the device back into a port, on my arm. A blinking strip of light on the locator didnt miss a beat. The patrolman gargled angrily, and Ammi retorted with a swift punch to the nose. She then quickly replaced the shiv into his neck. No more gargling. Panting, I stumbled back a building and sat down, resting on it. My head ached from the sudden movement and the new locator device. Ammi dragged the body to a skip dumpster and placed him in and closed it. 'That was much longer than before, Tauno,' Ammi was stern. 'Yeah, its getting overwhelmed. I don't think its going to be able to work next time.' The terminal chip in my arm was able to detect the locators path and predict where the soldier was going to be told where to go. Even if he didnt. It would then send false GPS info back into the system, and according to the monitor, nothing was up. But it was doing this hundreds of times a second, for three locators now. To maintain a steady speed of data falsification and transmition, the chip needed to slow all its other processes down. With no more time to spare we headed off.
The altercation had happened a lot closer to the hub than I had thought. We entered the old mall thorugh a back entrance. Had looting not occured, the glass of the door may not have been shattered, preventing our entrance. We just had to hope that the looters hadn't found what we were looking for. The smooth white ceramic tiles reflected the small amount of light bouncing in from the street. The sun was setting. We had been out here too long. We found the old staff door. It wasn't hidden, a deep green against the harsh white of the tiles. The door was dented and handle looked like someone had taken a few serious attempts at breaking it. Ammi walked up and gently tried the handle. Nothing. She looked back with a little smirk, 'Had to give it a shot,'. The door was fucked beyond a keycards use. But not beyond mechanical limbs. Looters rarely had metal arms or legs. Police and company soldiers would be swarming the hotspots - getting caught stealing AND being a 'borg? That was most certainly doom. While not illegal to be a cyborg, it was illegal to go to backstreet bodyshops. And nobody I or Ammi knew could afford half decent legal metal. Ammi made scrap metal of the door, giving it a hearty boot at the latch. It loudly clanged agaisnt a matte grey steel wall. We were deep enough in the mall that stealth wasnt a matter. Just had to be sure that we were quick was all. Down three doors, stairs on the left and second door on the right. This door was open anyway. That was worrying, but could also have meant nothing. We entered the old hub. My hand were held in tight fists, Ammi kept her shiv hidden, but still within a split second's grab. A soft buzzing from one of the corners, let us know the place was powered. Evacuated suburbs were always cut from the power grid. Soft blue light from screens washed over us as we searched the aparmtent sized area. It was the hub for all activities we used to do - illicit or not. Seeing it not busy with people was odd. 'I found the safe, would code be in here?' Ammi said. 'Surely not,' I snorted. 'now we need a "Construct",' That was the next item on our list that Ammi had written. She gave it a short description as well. It was a small box, with a few switches on a face with a small lens, sitting on one of the higher shelves on the wall. 'I got it,' I said Out of curiosity, I flicked one of the switches. Out of the lens, some light bled. Looking in, the box certainly seemed bigger than its physical form. A thin grid of blue lines seemed to be about half a metre away inside the box. In front of that was a flickering wireframe of a blank face. This was old tech for sure. I called Ammi over and stood her about half a metre away and looked through the box. Disappointingly it didn't scan her face. Ammi laughed when I told her what I tried. She grabbed the machine and flicked the other switches around and peered into box. Standing static, I noticed her finger sliding around on one of the other faces of the box. She looked up from the box and blinked a couple times at me, 'It's old tech, but check it,' She paused, proudly, 'I used some of these before,' I may have snatched it back, but I was engrossed with the idea of this old machinery. Instead of a blank face, it seemed to show a specific face, who's; I couldn't say. There was some log of speech to the right of the face. Ammi snatched it back before I could read and looked in for a few moments. 'It says if we hook it up, it knows the code to the safe,' 'How,' I was in disbelief 'It's kinda like an AI, it knows some stuff,' We hooked it up and it opened the safe. Inside sat our riches. A shit ton of cocaine, some MDMA and a small amount of heroin. But behind that was a small mountain of speed - street gold. We were rich. As long as no one else came looking for the goods.
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itsbenedict · 7 years ago
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i just finished Horizon: Zero Dawn, which holy dicks, might have been my game of the year if persona 5 hadn’t also come out this year. spoiler-heavy impressions (in the form of chatlogs with zero) under the cut:
god damn this game is just fun to play all the sneaking around and shooting stuff is really satisfying, and it feels great encountering some new machine that you don't know how to handle, and figuring out how to deal with it the balance is just right- strong machines can fuck you up, but nothing's a one-hit kill- if you fuck up, you get to chug health potions and run like hell until it loses interest, and then you try again it welcomes and rewards experimentation you organically develop strategies for taking them on stuff that seems intimidating and impossibly hard at first eventually becomes easy- not because you leveled up and got stronger numbers than it, but because you've done this before, you know how to dispatch these things in a matter of moments the giant crocodiles- scary, but you can knock off two thirds of their health by igniting their blaze canisters, and then play keepaway with their easily dodged ice blasts while you chip off the rest with easy headshots the swarms of hawks- overwhelming at first, but they completely flip out if you shoot two fire arrows at them, and you can keep them all downed while you work on taking them out the giant charging desert bulls- a couple ice bombs from the sling more or less immobilize them and make them take massive damage you always start terrified, trying different ammo on different weak points until you find something that works and then you feel like an invincible badass despite not really being any stronger in absolute terms
Zerovirus: that's the good shit
Benedict: it reminds me of the witness, in that you progress and gain abilities by learning systems and getting good, rather than by getting abstract experience points and leveling up i mean, you do level up, but it's just more health mostly
Zerovirus: health, more inventory, better harvesting abilities is what i think it was? and some jump ambush skills
Benedict: it's health and skill points the skills are pretty cool- none of them feel mandatory, but they all make something slightly easier like one gives you a few seconds of bullet time to line up a shot- it doesn't let you do anything you couldn't before, but now you're more likely to succeed and then there's the stealth melee takedowns that i barely use because everything in the fucking game notices you if you get too close no matter how quiet you're being for the same reason, i haven't used overriding since the game made me for a quest early on my advantage is in staying far away and hidden and able to disengage at will getting in close is always such a bad idea
Zerovirus: on the other hand, i'm pretty sure eventually you can override t-rexes and just watch kaijus fight
Benedict: oh yeah the cauldrons the first time i encountered one of those was incredible like, okay, here's a post-apocalyptic wilderness, but OH GOD TETRAHEDRON SPACESHIP ZONE
Zerovirus: were they disorienting for you as a player?i kept getting lost watching the lper navigate them they were really damn cool though what a great total environment change
Benedict: no not really so far they're pretty linear anyway they'd be cooler if the reward for completing them wasn't "now you can do that thing you never do to more things"
Zerovirus: just do the one that lets you do that thing to t-rexes it's entirely viable to go for an override playstyle with sufficient bolas and big boss monsters to hax i mean, you have the bolas, right the.. i mean, the ropecaster the thing-what-lets-you-tie-robots-down-and-make-them-easy-killings
Benedict: oh, right i uh haven't used that either like at all, i haven't tried it yet
Zerovirus: dude try out the ropecaster the ropecaster is what makes override viable as a playstyle it's basically 'shoot it three times in any part of its body to totally immobilize it for a few seconds' (bigger ones might need more than three i think)
Benedict: honestly i haven't thought about it much since my other weapons are so cool, but huh i think the reason i didn't try was because it seemed too good to be true "yeah, this thing you just shoot and it stops the enemy"
Zerovirus: no dude the ropecaster is easily the coolest weapon really locking down enemies is super effective well, that and setting up wire traps and just letting your enemies walk right into them that one never gets old either
Benedict: i use the tripcaster... probably not as intended
Zerovirus: ==>?
Benedict: like you're supposed to put it in an enemy's patrol path so they walk into it but the problem with that is they're usually around other enemies and if you go in to capitalize, you'll get ganged up on
Zerovirus: what the lper i watched did was set up like eight traps in a ring around himself and then make lots of sound and just watch the mobs walk into his death circle it was, frankly, really amusing
Benedict: i tried that once- it failed because i tried it on sawtooths, who, uh they jump. over. the wires. and kill you. oh my favorite enemy to fight right now is ravagers they're huge and scary, but it's so easy to kill them one tearblast arrow to the exposed gun pick up gun fucking annihilate everything in sight there's only a few things that really bug me about this game so far one is that the voice actors are way better than the writers, and it feels so weird hearing good voice actors try to breathe life into really fucking tedious dialogue there's been maybe two characters with more than one personality trait
Zerovirus: the plot of this game isn't super deep or anything don't worry about it too much it's very hollywood robot apocalypse scifi
Benedict: yeah, i'm not- i'm here for the cool robot hunting the game does some pretty ham-fisted stuff to explain why the player is the only one who can do a quest 90% of the time it's "this area is taboo, and everyone but you is too superstitious for some reason" also: the inventory screen is bugged out wrt the little exclamation points to indicate you have new shit i can't discern a pattern, they just seem to be placed at random 
SEVERAL DAYS LATER
Benedict: so zero you told me not to worry about the writing, the plot isn't super deep or anything but holy fucking shit almighty horizon zero dawn got so damn cool i think my gripes with the writing early on were a product of how the nora suck they're an offensive native american caricature, a bunch of nature-worshipping tribal dimwits with more superstitions than brain cells as soon as the writers stopped writing the nora, the writing improved immensely and i'm pretty much almost done with the plot at this point i reached zero dawn and went and heard gaia's message in all-mother mountain and holy fuck this plot got so cool i honestly wasn't expecting explanations for stuff the beginning of the game got me thinking they'd be more interested in treating the whole sci-fi backstory as a mythology for the world like yeah cauldrons make machines, they're like, some fuckin factory whatsit the Mysterious Ancients made instead of what i got, which was several extended sequences of crawling around in ancient ruins and getting a meticulously thought-through backstory through audio logs and stuff my jaw was hanging open for like the whole zero dawn facility section "no, they didn't stop the robot apocalypse halfway- they let it play out until the robots ran out of biomass to eat and reduced the earth to a lifeless hunk of rock, and then deployed a friendly AI to re-seed it with biological life" holy shit incidentally: holy FUCK was the Hades subsystem a phenomenally shitty idea hey gaia try this: if you fuck up, reset things yourself!! you don't need an autonomous ABSOLUTE DEATH GOD that fucking takes over your systems and fights you for control!! it was just such a terrible plan that it breaks my suspension of disbelief a little with all the audio logs in the zero dawn facility with candidates second-guessing and questioning the entire project, no one thought to bring up "hey, maybe the WIPE OUT ALL LIFE AGAIN adversarial subsystem we're building carries a few inherent risks" the conflict here kinda seems like a diabolus ex machina, honestly they could have easily just had Hades be an accidentally reactivated Horus unit- the Faro robots kind of already have a wipe-out-all-life directive that would make perfect sense technobabble your way into saying the Faro plague hacked Gaia somehow, and boom but fucking Hades the whole conflict driving the plot is the equivalent of the supervillain who builds a big red self-destruct button on his machine that aside, this game's plot has turned out to be really fucking cool i came close to tears a few times in the zero dawn facility humanity's best and brightest having various visceral reactions to the shock and despair of the project's nature god damn was that one of the coolest reveals i've ever had in a video game i'm really pleasantly surprised by how much detail it gave me- it really made "find out what the fuck is the deal" the player's central motivation i think the nora shit in the beginning got me expecting that their worldview would be more or less validated by the narrative but now i come back to the starting area to save all their asses, and it becomes abundantly clear that these people are small and backwards and the world is so much bigger than them likewise the moment where fuckin whatshisname dadmurderer captures you and puts you in the sun-ring right on the heels of all the huge plot reveals he's standing there monologuing about prophecy and the sun and how important he is and following what i'd just gone through, it was so, so pathetic to watch this half-naked thug go on and on about how this, this moment of knocking me out and capturing me for some gladiatorial shit, was the most important moment in the world and i'm just sitting there shaking my head at him like, dude, you ain't shit. you ain't even in the vicinity of shit.oh, you've got a corrupted behemoth for me to fight, totally unarmed? don't make me fucking laugh, i eat that shit for breakfast (sorta took the wind out of sylens' rescue at the end when whathisface sicced two corruptors on me) (like dude i had this. two corruptors is god damn child's play.) i'm so fucking overpowered right now, i've completed every single sidequest save the armor one, where i still need the core from the last area oh, corrupted thunderjaw pinning down the entire nora tribe? Y-fucking-AWN ice bombs plus actual bombs, dead in two minutes not that the combat has become boring- attacks still hurt, i have to dodge and get the fuck out of the way and heal off hits that take off more than half my bar, it's really tense- but i can always heal, can always dodge, there's a great rhythm to attacking and dodging and attacking and dodging
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