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genofae · 1 month ago

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Let me be Yours part1

Nanami Kento x Afab Reader

Content: Office sex, oral and fingering. POC reader

TW: smut. MDNI

Sometimes you wonder what happened for you to stay at your job past 10 pm, especially when you consider how much you despise this side of your job. No, you were not a masochist, even though your browser history has some funny searches, you were just in love with your section chief Nanami Kento.

When you first joined the team you didn’t have many expectations; maybe one or two coworkers you could hang out with during lunch; perhaps a cute guy you could watch once in a while. But Him? Nanami-please fuck me against my desk- Kento? You were one step from combusting in your shitty pink blouse you bought years ago, pretty much wetting your underwear like a horny teenager first discovering porn.

He wasn’t just another man. No, he was way more.

His first impression was just the beginning. His put-together appearance like he had everything in control and the way his deep calm voice would give the team's instructions to function as a piece of well-oiled machinery, heaven and hell itself teamed up to create that hottie of a man. But you were aware that it was a temporary and physical attraction, one you could control.

Too bad the universe made sure to remind you how wrong you can be.

At first, you spent a few minutes of your day looking at him. Then those few minutes got longer. Now you couldn't stop staring at his surprisingly strong arms, the size of his hands that could choke and please every inch of your body, how his fingers parted his hair, or how desirable his chest looked whenever he ditched his blazer over the chair during busy days. But you still thought that it was some silly hobby you did from afar.

But by the time you realized you were in love, it was late. Nanami quickly became someone special.

You weren't sure when, but you were not complaining either. He was responsible and kind to your coworkers, especially to you. He would thank you when you brought him coffee whenever you saw him tired, and help him organize his desk in case he was in a hurry. There were days when you both decided to stay until very late to finish a project and spend an insane amount of time together.

And that's exactly what happened that day. Although; you enjoy each other's company, overtime on a Friday night was a mood killer.

"Oh, Mr. Nanami! Guess who bought you a sandwich from the one food truck that was still open," you said while holding, proudly, a plastic bag with his food. "I was one step from ordering something from WacDonalds, but fortunately I found one. They said their food was good but the final verdict it's up to you boss."

Nanami hated overtime. Yes, everybody does, but he never failed to express his despise towards staying until very late working, so you suspect he didn't prepare any food beforehand, unlike you who always had one or two snacks just in case.

"Here, your favorite." You said, leaving his food on his desk, away from the papers and computer. He just looked at you with a tired yet grateful smile.

"You didn't need to do that. I can eat greasy food without dying. But thank you nonetheless," He said, looking briefly at your appearance and feeling guilty. You look out of breath and messy from all that running, but he couldn’t say more because he knew his dark eye bags and wrinkly shirt were ten times worse.

You chuckle at his answer "You do? I always thought you were too old to enjoy some old-time favorite junk food," you said sitting down in the nearest chair, exhausted. "Sorry, I couldn't get anything to drink. "

"Again, you don't have to, water it's just fine, " he took a bite of his sandwich, leaving a soft moan savoring the food. You were relieved it was tasty enough. "Ok, maybe you do. This is a nice one," he said, licking at his lips, one gesture you'd normally find unimpressive, but Nanami always made sure to catch your attention with the most simple things.

His lips were slightly shiny, tempting. Imagine how soft they might be from afar. He had a respectful way to speak to others. Did that also apply to his kisses? Or his gentlemanly appearance would turn into a disrespectful passion that would put anyone to their knees? Maybe, you knew how sarcastic his persona became when angry. Nanami was a man who carefully humiliated with elegance, you've seen it before, and deep down, you crave being the one put in their place by him.

"Are you alright?" his voice got you out of your trance bursting your bubble. "I'm serious, you don't have to stay with me. Go home and rest, I can finish this tomorrow morning."

"Mr. Nanami, you know I won't let you do that." you stood up in front of him as if you weren't dying a moment before. And unconsciously approached him forgetting any professional behavior " It's the third time this month they left our team extra work for gods knows why! And we both know who takes said extra responsibility. I'll not let you handle this by yourself, you look exhausted!"

Then he said, "So you do," and he was right about that. Within the past months, your concealer has gotten more covering to hide your dark circles. So you sighted defeated

"Are you sure there's something else?"

"Not really. It's either mine or someone else's job."

“Nothing?”

“Not a thing, Miss Guerrero. I’m dead serious.”

"Alright," you accepted his answer. The least you wanted is to sound like a pushover. "I'll get my stuff and organize before leaving."

The clock just struck 11 o’clock, and the temperature in the office got worse, security turned off the air conditioner long ago, and your blouse was paying once again the consequences. You also wish you could get rid of your hosiery right there, but that would be inappropriate.

Thankfully all your things were in order, unlike yourself. As soon as you feel the sweat over your body, you take a look in your pocket mirror.

“Fuck!” you said horrified. Everything was a mess, from the hair to the makeup. “Nanami saw me like this?!” checking and fixing to some degree your appearance. Hopefully, the rest of your foundation could hide your embarrassment. How can you confront him after that?

Well, it was already late. You fixed the rest as much as possible before saying goodbye and finishing the night.

Barely crossing the door to his office, you saw him immersed in his computer. You also noticed he finished his sandwich and left behind a trail of disposable cups with coffee and water along with other folders and documents. You doubt he heard you coming.

"Mr. Nanami, I'm leaving." your voice was low, trying not to distract him more. “I hope you have a good night”

He nodded and said, "You too Miss. Guerrero." while settling in his chair trying to be less uncomfortable.

Then a crack sound, one very loud crack.

You, who were almost closing the door, turned around both surprised and worried. Nanami; in the same manner as yours, looked shocked.

"What was that?" you asked, kinda knowing the answer. "Mr.Nanami!" you approach him immediately.

"Everything is fine, I'm alright!" he tried to say but it didn't matter, you were already in front of him trying to figure out where that sound came from.

You never intended to be bold, but your hands were currently on his neck and shoulder, looking for something. Right at the moment, you didn’t stop, you left aside the fact that he was your boss and you were crossing his boundaries.

Your hands traveled and touched without noticing how red his face was and how nervous his breathing got. In his mind, Nanami tried to convince himself it was because of the situation; but not even he could ignore how close your chest was from his face. He thanked the office for having feeble lights, otherwise, he could have been able to tell the color of your bra.

“Mr.Nanami your body isn’t supposed to sound like that,” you said, doing a bit more pressure in between his neck and shoulder. “How long have you been like this? ”

“For a while.” His answer was vague, like many others that involved his health, so you assume it has been more than a while. “My vacations are in less than a month, I’ll be ok”

“Mr.Nanami, don’t lie to me. I know how much you hate overworking” you said. “If you needed to relax you could have said so. I can give you a massage” you suggested.

Nanami was scandalized, “Miss Guerrero, I can’t let you do that!” He was attempting to dismiss your idea.“It would be unprofessional of me, I don’t want to compromise you.”

Being rational, he was right. Nanami might put you in danger as an employee under his care. But there was more about his answer, he refused to let things escalate because he knew how much power you had over his body.

The slight touch of your fingers over his neck was enough to destabilize him. His legs trembled anxiously anytime you moved closer to him, yearning for more.

In the privacy of his home, he could imagine, whispering your name as a lover does, and you'd do the same. If he focused enough, he might even taste the sweetness of your lips, the softest of your skin, and the way your body reacts to his own.

Nanami would take you in as many ways as possible. Listen to your demands. Harder, slower, deeper. You'd be whimpering and digging your nail on his back lost in pleasure, and he would be pressing down your thighs to make sure you take every inch.

"No, I must stop," he thought.

This wasn’t the privacy of his home and your presence nor part of his imagination.

"You don't have to," he whispered.

"But I want to," you replied. "Now get comfortable and leave it to me, Boss"

"Now that I think about it we should move somewhere less chaotic," you remark. His desk wasn't necessarily easy, full of obstacles. Perhaps that one sofa at the corner of his office would work, there were a few things out of place, but nothing you couldn’t solve. " You know what? Why don't you get more comfortable while I prepare some stuff?"

"Yes...sure," he said quietly.

Meanwhile, he took advantage of your absence to calm himself. His chest moved faster, looking for more air than he normally needed. Unfortunately, the real challenge was hiding the bulge in between his thighs, Nanami doubted the lack of light could conceal his arousal.

Nanami always considered himself someone respectful. He avoided unnecessary conflict as much as possible, just like swearing or violent outbursts, and the fact Gojo still walked with all his teeth was proof of it, however being around you was an exception.

He knows it’s not intentional, he trusts you. But in moments like this Nanami didn't trust himself with you, someone so sweet, so bright. A living temptation that torments him every day he is beside you.

“I’m done, Nanami. You can come” you said with a playful tone, maybe it was intentional.

Thankfully the sofa was big enough for you two. You saw how he left his tie over his desk and came near, undoing his first two buttons and sitting in front of you, giving you his back.

“You can start, I’m also ready,” he said, not looking at you.

When you proposed giving him a massage you never thought it would be naughty because of your previous experience working as a masseuse before changing your career path. You had the training, and the skill, and have seen multiple people with barely anything, not the actual situation, but the point is understandable. Your intentions were never about taking some advantage of; however you'll soon realize how odd the whole situation is, not now, but you will.

As soon as you let your hand reach his shoulder you noticed how his body reacted immediately. The stiffness of his posture was concerning, Nanami's muscles were so tense you could compare them to a rock. You left a sight and started.

You keep massaging his lower neck and shoulder blades. Sometimes a bit further on his back, but never crossing his waistline, now fearing that it would make him uncomfortable.

Up and down, and applying bits of pressure. His breath became slower and his stiffness began to fade. Nanami melted on your hands like butter.

"How are you feeling? It's everything alright?" you whispered, coming near to his ear. He just shook his head with a soft motion.

His voice sounded raspy and lower, maybe he was finally relaxing. "No," he answered almost out of breath. "It feels good"

For instance, you realized that providing these services, in particular, wasn’t your brightest idea. Hearing his voice had an immediate effect on your body; as if it had awoken a dormant kink, but you had to be professional and keep going. You'll deal with your wet underwear later.

"I know it's not my business nor my responsibility," you said. " but I'm honest when I said that I don't like it when you push your limits."

He chuckled softly, which was a relief because you were beginning to sense the difference in his posture.

"Considering the things you do for me, it's kind of obvious that you care for my well-being," He said softly "and I don't think I could be more grateful that you're by my side, especially now. I haven’t talked to anyone but..."

"But?"

"but I think you deserve to know that I decided to leave... "

"You are quitting?!" you asked, obviously surprised by the news.

"Yes, I've been thinking about it for a long time and it's time to move on. We both know this job isn't exactly my passion."

He couldn't be more miserable.

Even when you stopped to process the information, you felt a great discomfort in your belly, as if instead of butterflies you had wasps in your stomach. The universe decides to give you the middle finger and laugh at your face. But you couldn't complain either, at some point, your paths were going to part, you just wished it wouldn't be so soon.

"Oh..." was all you could reply.

"Don't worry, before I leave I'll make sure to make up for all the sandwiches you bought me," he said, trying to cheer you up.

His proposal wasn't bad, that way you'd figure out how to make up for what you had left as partners and coworkers. "You mean go out to dinner or literally pay for them?" you asked jokingly using a more cheerful voice since it wouldn't do to let on how much you were affected by his departure. "Because those gourmet breads you like so much aren't cheap at all."

Nanami, who was still mostly turning his back on you, took the opportunity and that he was more comfortable, to slightly lean his body on you and rest his head near the hollow between your neck. Nanami smiled, his lips almost touching your neck. "Whatever you want, I've always intended to spoil you, even if it's with small gestures" he finally said, his voice just as husky as before. "It's the least I can do for my favorite assistant."

“Nanami, please, I’m your only assistant!”

“Even better, that way I can give you all my attention”

You couldn't hold back the smile "You already do that every day"

“ I do” he asked

“Yes! I couldn't ask for a better boss " When you mentioned his position it was in an attempt to keep what was left of your sanity. Your body temperature was rising with the minutes, your clothes were making you uncomfortable and getting in the way. The reasons had nothing to do with poor office maintenance.

His skin, his voice, the closeness of your bodies, and the subtle scent of his cologne, notes of tangerine, tonka bean, and sandalwood. You could try to hold your breath as long as you wanted, but at the end of the day, this man was the main source of your despair.

"I don't think you understand what I mean " Nanami broke away from you and adjusted her position to face you. "I want to show my gratitude to the one person who has kept me sane all this time. I don't think I could have made it through these last few weeks without you, please let me show you how grateful I am that you're by my side; even if it's just for one night."

"Nanami... I" you murmured without paying much attention to your surroundings or the blond's newfound closeness. At no point could you look away or move, you just stood there enraptured by his eyes as his hands gently cupped your face and deposited a chaste kiss at the corner of your lips.

The sensation was short, basically imperceptible, but that was enough to elicit a desperate gasp from you, eager for more.

He didn't wait, still avoiding your lips, Nanami began to kiss your cheeks. Tracing a map of caresses until he reached the junction of your jaw and lightly tested the ground on your neck. From chaste strokes to more intense strokes, sometimes you felt the brush of her teeth. You felt even more heat on your cheeks and the blond's mouth on the most sensitive part of your neck, biting and kissing more and more vehemently. None of this was helping to keep your moans in check.

"Please y/n, tell me we can go on."

"Nanami" you whispered, your mind was softly and slightly lost in his caresses. "Please" you finally agreed. "Please don't stop"

You sounded desperate for more and rightfully so. Nanami pulled away from you completely and for an instant, you felt cold even as your body kept rising in temperature.

You wanted to beg him to come back, but he just put his fingers on your lips preventing you from saying another word. And with all the gentleness in the world, he started to walk up and down your legs making you more comfortable on the couch, your back was completely laid back on the sofa while he continued his tour of your thighs covered by your stockings.

His hands covered most of your thighs, gently squeezing the soft flesh and tracing his lips over your body again. You already knew how warm his lips were on your skin, but feeling them on the most sensitive part of your inner thighs was a different experience.

“Do you like it, y/n?” he asked looking directly at you “Because I know I do” he said giving a quick kiss to the part where your underwear limits your body. “ But I need an answer unless you want me to stop here”

You gasped before giving him an answer, he began teasing your pussy with kind licks that wet through your hosiery and took your sanity in the process “Yes… Yes please” you finally responded to him.

“Good girl,” he said, smiling at you.

Nanami caressed your thighs until she reached the edge of your underwear and stockings. The blond smiled mischievously as he began to play with the elastic and then carefully slid your stockings down your thigh and calves until he reached your ankles. When he finally managed to get rid of them he didn't hesitate to kiss your ankle before moving your legs over his shoulders.

Repositioning her face again between your thighs, you could now feel the warmth of her skin directly against yours. Nanami couldn't wait any longer, with one last look he brought his tongue close to that wet patch in your underwear. The first few licks were tentative, but once he heard your sweet gasps and felt you moving against his face in search of more friction, he didn't hesitate to grab your thighs and dive into your covered pussy and lick more.

The sounds were obscene. His tongue was hard against your panties, It was getting more and more soaked with your arousal and his saliva. Unconsciously you moved your pelvis looking for more pressure, but it wasn't enough. You needed the contact to be even more direct.

Nanami enjoyed your neediness. Looking at you almost gone in pleasure sure was a spectacle. He was a good man, he could feel what you needed the most, but not yet. For an instant, he separated himself from you. You protested his absence, and he just smiled. Nanami moved to the fabric of your underwear and exposed your pussy lips to the environment.

— So pretty. — he kissed them briefly before submerging himself fully into your cunt. Licking, sucking, and teasing your hole. Nanami was merciless as you began to pant.

His nose hit your neglected clit more than once, the friction was delicious, but not enough to make you cum. In an attempt to intensify the sensation, you grabbed his hair and hump his nose as he dived his tongue inside your pussy. — Oh, please!... Kento, please. — you moaned with a bit of desperation. He let go a little laugh to your annoyance, and before you could protest he dive one of his fingers into your pussy replacing his tongue and moving his lips close to the hood of your clit, but not enough to make contact.

— Oh, is this what you need, darling? Do you want me to suck here? — his tone was playful, mocking your desperation. Nanami gave a quick lick to your click and you clenched your walls over his fingers. You nodded but he didn’t look pleased. — Use your words. Do you want me to suck your clit? Do you want to cum on my fingers?. —

This time he began to move his digits in and out of your pussy, they were bigger than yours and a lot more skillful since it didn’t take them a lot to find that little rough patch above your pelvis. He looked at you, loving how easy it was to make you yearn for him. His mistreatment didn't stop. Nanami kept hitting your spot waiting for your words even if you couldn't articulate his name without babbling.

— ple…aSE! Aah!... Kena…ToO! –

— What you say, darling? I can understand. Do you need something from me? — he teased.

— Cum! I need to cum, pleaasee!

He smiled — Whatever you need. —

He put aside his own arousal and concentrated on moving his fingers with more precision, hitting your g-spot. Your body couldn't hold it anymore, your breathing became irregular, your sight blurry. Walls were ready to finish all over his fingers. And when you did, your eyes closed tightly as your body trapped Nanami's fingers, covering him and the sofa with your juices.

Nanami pulled out from your body, amazed by your beauty. Then he proceeds to lick his fingers moaning from the taste.— Am afraid we need somewhere comfier. My apartment perhaps. — he said. — What do you think?

As you incorporated more, you saw how little his pants were counseling his boner. To say you wanted to reciprocate the favor was an understatement, but he was right. His office was not the place for that, as if he didn't already make you see stars minutes before.

— Well… we do deserve a break.

He nodded. — You’re always right. What would I do without you? — Nanami leaned to your height and kissed you one last time before helping you dress. The night was young, and for to new found lovers, that was the best news they could receive.

Hopefully, I will finish this someday. You guys have no idea how much dust this shit was collecting.

My first smut, not entirely proud of the outcome, but I've seen worse things being done.

if you guys find a mistake, my bad.

Bone appel teet.

#Nanami kento smut #jjk smut #nanami x reader #not my first language #kento nanami #jjk fanfic

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astercontrol · 3 months ago

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excerpt from WIP... TRON, post-1982

"Hey Alan. You ever wonder, what if programs were alive?"

"Alive, as in, conscious artificial intelligence? I mean, if you've been following the investigation, they're fairly sure the MCP was that, on some level."

"Huh."

Roy was silent for a moment. He had been following, of course, and was aware... but for the first time he found himself considering the implications.

Not the world-rocking news that ENCOM might have created the very first computer capable of real thought. That'd been all over the in-system message boards for weeks now. Technically still just speculation; who knew if it would ever make it into mainstream news... anyway, that wasn't the thought that troubled Roy, right now.

It was the realization that Alan... sweet gentle nerdy Alan, whose office wall enshrined, like a plaque of the Ten Commandments, an old sci-fi movie quote about taming a violent machine with a command to do no harm... had been the one who'd had to kill it.

"Yeah, but I wonder... I mean. You're the one with the AI credentials, so you'd know this a lot better than me... like, in theory, is there any way that intelligence could have... I dunno, spread to other programs?"

"I mean, the MCP was in control of practically everything for a while there. Its processes were running the whole system. I suppose you could argue that there was a period of time when all the software active in our system was running off the MCP's basic... intelligence, if that's what it could be called."

He took off his glasses; brought the end of the bar close to his mouth in that endearing thoughtful way of his. "Of course, not all of it was following the MCP's directives. It all had different goals, including some like mine that was even programmed to sabotage the MCP-- but, well, you could certainly say that it was all using the same processing capacity."

"So, like... if you imagined them as living minds, it'd be almost like the computer was the brain, and all the programs running in it were like... multiple personalities or something?" Many souls in one body, a whole crowd of individual people living in there together...

"I suppose you could, loosely, imagine it that way. Not that simple, because the MCP's programming would've been what gave the computer the ability to have any 'personalities' in the first place. But, as a very crude explanation... I guess it holds up. Sort of."

Roy tilted his head, curious. Alan was answering these questions a little faster, a little more assuredly than he usually spoke.

Just a little. Just barely noticeable, to someone who'd been around him for as long as Roy had. But it was there.

"You given this any thought before?"

Alan shrugged, awkward smile breaking out, lopsided. "I give thought to everything, Roy. I consider all possibilities, it's part of the job."

Roy's eyes followed Alan as he turned back to his monitor. Still such a cheerful voice and stance, no more troubled than Alan usually looked.

...Sure didn't seem like a guy pondering the possibility that he'd massacred a whole society of brand new life forms by wiping out the source of their consciousness.

"Hey..."

"What?" Alan's head turned back, just the lightest note of annoyance.

"I'd like to talk about this some more sometime. I think I'm... interested in learning more about the programming involved in it. Like, just what sort of commands went into the task of erasing the MCP."

Alan laughed and shook his head. "Sure, maybe. But it's not that interesting. Or that simple. I mean, 'erase' is an easy way to say it, if you're trying to give someone a quick overview. But it involved the identification and shutdown of a whole lot of specific individual functions and processes."

"Hmm." A thoughtful nod. "Selectively. The ones that were causing problems, then."

"More or less. But, like I said, it's complicated. I'm sure my explanation would get awfully boring after a while."

"Oh, you never bore me." Roy grinned. "Anyway-- sorry if I'm keeping you from anything. I'm headed off to lunch; you want anything?"

"I'm fine, Roy. Go on, enjoy your lunch."

Roy walked slowly down the corridor, lost in thought. "Klaatu Barada Nikto" indeed.

#tron 1982 #tronblr #tron #roy kleinberg #alan bradley #master control program #tron fanfiction #wip #writing #Encom System #Encom DID System

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dandylovesturtles · 2 years ago

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once again writing fanfic for an AU that's not mine

uh hi so I guess it is Crying About Future Donnie Hours except this is actually a different future Donnie than the one everyone else is crying about.

I have wanted to write something for @kathaynesart 's Replica for awhile now and I got an idea and I decided to use @tmntaucompetition as an excuse to write and post it, so I guess you could say this is propaganda I didn't expect it to be the day after my poll though so I kinda scrambled a bit aaaaa lol

Replica is one of my favorite ROTTMNT comics, it's one of the first I found after I watched the movie, and I love it so much. If you haven't read it please do! However, there is one part of the comic in particular (and especially one line in particular) that has stuck with me since I first read it, and I think about it a lot. So consider this my little homage to that part of the comic, and to the character who says it.

Also there is a short section of this that is just dialogue from the comic so obviously all credit for that dialogue goes to Kat!

And Kat I really hope you don't mind me playing around in your sandbox a bit /)_(\

Anyway I don't normally title these but I did give the gdoc for this one the title: The Needed Functions to Appreciate It

I hope you enjoy!

~~~

As an AI, experiencing the apocalypse was different.

S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. did not have to feel the aching gnaw of hunger, or the bite of the cold. He did not feel the sting of acid rain on skin, or the seeping of blood from injury. All the physical sensations his family and friends suffered, S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. was spared them all.

That did not mean he didn’t feel.

…

“Hey Dee?”

The “Hm?” he got in response was distracted. Donnie was often distracted those days. S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. didn’t resent him for it. He knew how busy Donnie is - he cataloged and prioritized the to-do list himself, after all.

“I still have the timers Raph asked me to set for his training in the system, and all his old records. What…” He hesitated. “What should I do with them?”

“Oh.” That got Donnie to pause in his work oh so briefly. His finger tapped twice on the enter key without pressing. “You can delete all of that. Might as well free up memory space where we can.”

“Okay.” It was the right answer. Members of the resistance were allowed to set timers and save some personal files on S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N.’s system, and protocol dictated that forty eight hours after loss of vitals, S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. should clear such files.

It had been three hundred and fifty seven hours since Raph flatlined. He should have cleared these ages ago.

“Hey Dee,” he said again, more quietly this time, and Donnie actually looked away from his work and gave him his attention.

He hadn’t had a physical body since a raid over a year before; he was just an artistic representation on the monitor. Donnie promised to make him a new one, but S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. could see both the parts inventory and the to-do list and he doubted he would be able to do that. Usually it didn’t bother him, but he thought that day that it bothered him a little.

“I don’t want to,” he admitted, and Donnie’s face shifted to something more sad.

“Ah. You have developed a lot of sentimentality…” Donnie sighed, not unkindly. “Well, you can keep it. I won’t make you delete it.”

S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. bounced around the monitor a moment while he mulled it over. Donnie didn’t look away, though one of his battleshell arms took up the task of typing on his computer.

“Isn’t that not good, though, dude? Like… it’s useless now. It’s just taking up space.”

“Yes… sentimentality and practicality are often in direct conflict.” He leaned back in his chair, eyes roving to the ceiling. “Sometimes we just can’t let things go, even against our better judgment, because they remind us of something or… someone.”

S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. zoomed himself in so he filled more of the screen. “Do you get sentimental, Dee?”

Donnie’s lips quirked up in a smile. “Yes, unfortunately so. I find it vexing… though, Mikey would say, “That’s what makes you a person, Donnie, don’t fight it!” or something like that.”

“But if it makes you hold on to useless stuff, or do things that aren’t necessary, isn’t that bad?”

“Ah, such is the nature of emotions, Shelldon - they often lead us to do things that are, for a lack of a better word, suboptimal… Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a switch so I could just turn the pesky things off. I would focus so much better if I never had to feel… anxious or frustrated or… or sad.” He slumped forward, hugging his arms around himself. “If I didn’t have to… to miss anyone.”

“...That’s the worst one,” said S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N., and Donnie nodded.

“Yeah… yeah, it is.” He turned to face S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N., eyes glossy. “But-”

ERROR: Memory file corrupted.

“It is a convincing replica. Expertly crafted. You act just like him… Be careful that it does not interfere with our intended purpose.”

“Need I remind you, one of my core purposes is to act as a support to Donatello’s family. That includes you, even if you have chosen to forego the needed functions to appreciate it.”

“A necessary purge to keep the Kraang’s whispers at bay.”

“Was it? That is not what Donatello ever wished of you. Even when you decided to take on this burden.”

“Not having to ‘feel’ has its… benefits.”

“And Donatello was quite firm that you not lock yourself away-”

“Such advanced artificial intelligence, yet you still fail to recognize your own ignorance.”

“To what, exactly?”

“To the bliss in not having to miss him.”

Username: OMEGABOOTYYYSHAKER9000

Password: ****************

MEMORY FILE ACCESS AUTHORIZED

Enter date: XX/XX/20XX XX:XX

RETRIEVING MEMORY FILE. . . SUCCESS

AUDIOVISUAL PLAYBACK BEGIN

“But even if missing them keeps you from performing optimally… Running from bad emotions means running from the good ones, too.” Donatello sighed. “At least, that’s what Mikey said to me after Papa… And it took me awhile, but I realized he was right. Don’t tell him I said that, though, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Your secret is safe with me, dude.”

“Thank you, Shelldon.” He reached with his hand and touched the screen, and even though they couldn’t actually feel each other, S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. moved like he was nuzzling his palm. “When you see Raph’s training records, it makes you sad, but also makes you remember all the things you loved about him, right?”

“I guess, yeah… He’d always scratch my head when I came to give him his training report. When I had a body.”

“Mm, so that’s why you always went to do it in person.” Donatello chuckled, rubbing his thumb on the monitor. He was sad, then, thinking that he couldn’t build S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. a proper body. Always lacking the time and materials…

“Is it worth it, though?” asked S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N.. “The good feelings, when there’s bad feelings, too?”

“Maybe that’s one of the great mysteries of life, Shelldon. All I know is… I don’t want to give them up. Not anymore. And… it’s easier to deal with, when you’re not alone.” Donatello pulled his hand back, and looked at him very seriously. “Anata wa hitorijanai. That’s as true for you as it is for any of us. Your family will always be here for you, when you miss Raph, or anyone else.”

Maybe it made S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. feel better. He smiled, as much as his facial design would allow.

“Okay. And I’ll always be here for you too, Dee.”

“Thank you, Shelldon.”

“Love ya.”

“I love you too.”

End playback? Y

PLAYBACK ENDED

#dandy fanfiction #rottmnt replica #future donatello #S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N #future donnie #it would be really silly for him to access his memory files that way actually but #I needed a way to clearly delineate the shift in perspective lol #so don't mind me

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askbensolo · 1 month ago

Text

Journal Entry #48: Local Dude Already Hates the Job He Was So Excited to Get

Yeah. What the title says. It's been only a few weeks and I already hate my job. I don't know what I was expecting, really.

But...hey. The pay is higher than at my old position!

...That's my little mantra, anyway. I close my eyes, take a couple of deep breaths, and say, "the pay is better, the pay is better, the pay is better..."

Man...I don't know where to start. So...I guess I'll just start with the fact that upon starting this position, I was given my own text generation droid. And that already tells you a lot, right off the bat, doesn’t it?

I know I joked about that at my last job. But now it's not a joke—it's real.

Text generation droids are fairly new. Which is super weird, since protocol droids (and other droids capable of mimicking natural language) have been around forever. But, while natural-language droids use their speech abilities to communicate with us (and are so good at it they almost feel like other sentients)…they're not necessarily designed with the purpose of generating complex, or worse, creative, text samples. Threepio, for example, has no idea what to do when I ask him to freestyle rap.

And I have asked. More than once. Anyway—

My text generation droid at work is one of the Scribblr models. It's an SC-2 unit, so, I, uh...call her...Essie.

She also doubles as a personal assistant. And resembles a cute little humanoid lady, which I'm sure is sooo not sexist at all.

Only…about the size of a bottle of wine. She’s meant to fit on top of your desk, and she doesn’t move, which is weird for a droid. You have to pick her up and carry her if you want to move her around. But, mostly I just leave her in her charging dock on my desk. She communicates wirelessly with my work computer, and I can view her text generation outputs on the screen.

At first, I refused to use Essie's text generation function, because I, uh, you know, kinda wanted to WRITE, since that's what I thought I was hired to do—but my manager soon made it very clear to me that I could not possibly succeed in churning out the sheer quantity of content expected of me, without using Essie. Sooo...Essie and I are a team now. Unfortunately.

No—it sucks. It really, really sucks. What I am currently doing at my job cannot be described as writing. It's content generation, it's clickbait, it's mind-rotting sensationalist drivel for the masses, it's advertising and sponsored links and a never-ending battle to capture as much holonet traffic as possible—it's everything I hate as an artist.

But...hey. The pay is better!

Thepayisbetterthepayisbetterthepayisbetter—

Sigh. My hands are kinda tied. It's not gonna look good on my resume if I quit so soon. And I am not interested in starting a whole new job hunt, or crawling back to my old department in tears. So...guess I'm just...stuck here for a while. Me and Essie. Good ol' Essie...

The interesting thing about Essie is that I am 100% sure she is stealing my data at all times, recording my speech patterns when I talk to myself, tracking whatever little writing is actually being produced by me—because there is no other explanation as to why, instead of saying "Good morning, Ben Solo" like she used to, she is now saying "Yooo, 'sup buddy!" and "What's shakin’, my dude?"

She even said something was "wizard" the other day and...hooh, that made my heart flutter. Everyone else keeps telling me to stop trying to make "wizard" happen. But no. Not Essie.

I should probably be wiping her memory more often...but, honestly, I am way too amused by this. Today after lunch she said to me, "By the way bro, you have a stupid freaking meeting at three o'clock," and, ha—let me tell ya—it made my day. Fannie's lucky I still don't think droids are sentient, because, heh—well—if I did—wait, wait, no, actually I’m not gonna finish that sentence.

Ohhh, Essie! My bright light in a dark world.

...But I’m not becoming a droid guy. I’m not! Beebee-Ate and Threepio still drive me insane at home. And get this! You remember Sweeper? From my old office? Well, it turns out that every single department at the ChommSec Daily has also not updated their cleaning droids since before the Battle of Yavin, so it’s not the same Sweeper that’s on my new floor, but there’s definitely a Sweeper here, who I call Sweeper 2, and he is just as annoying as Sweeper 1. ARGH

#askbensolo #written #essie #the chommsec daily #droids #ben’s diary #sweeper

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five-rivers · 1 year ago

Text

On the Manufacture of Gods

AKA the reason I was complaining about the Generator Rex timeline earlier this week. @ all my DP followers, give Generator Rex a try if you haven't, yet. It definitely scratches that unethical human experimentation itch! :p

AO3

“You’re not still thinking about it, are you?”

“Huh?” Violeta looked up from her notebook, her pen spinning out of her hand and clattering onto the floor. “What?”

Rafael chuckled. “You are still thinking about it. That joke of a job offer.” He leaned across the dining room floor to peer at her notes. “Giving a bunch of rich idiots the power of God.”

“Mm,” said Violeta. “Maybe not that end goal, but the money… and the things we’d have to research on the way. I was thinking… You might know what they want isn’t possible, and they might know what they want isn’t possible. But in the meantime…” She trailed off, suggestively, and held up her notebook in front of her face.

“Are you suggesting we run a scam?” asked Rafael, taking the notebook. “Ah, a list of potential medical advances.”

“Computer science as well.”

“Human longevity, oncology, genetic diseases…”

“Not to mention physics, microbiology, bioengineering, nanotechnology…”

“It’s quite a list. A bit beyond our purview, though.”

“And we have quite a list of friends. Friends who might like steady work. Gabriel and Peter, at least.” Violeta smiled. “It’s a victimless crime, you know. If they have enough money to throw at something like this. And they would be getting their money’s worth.”

“Mhm,” said Rafael. “They do say that the first benefit of functional nanotechnology is immortality. But control over the fundamental forces of nature, not so much. God, it was so hard not to laugh in their faces when they said they wanted to control gravity and magnetism. We’re so, so far from that.”

“Yes, but imagine how much money they’d throw at you while you were researching the problem.”

Rafael smiled, imagining it. “It is a pleasant thought.”

The front door slammed open. “Mama! Papa!”

“We’re in here Ceasar!” called Violeta.

A seven-year-old with dirty, skinned knees skidded into the kitchen.

“Goodness,” said Violeta, getting up. “Did you fall down? Are you hurt?”

“No!” said Ceasar. “Mama, what’s bigger, cells or atoms?”

“Cells are bigger,” said Violeta. “They’re made out of atoms.”

“Ha!” said Ceasar, bouncing. “I told him, I told him!” He ran back to the door.

“Told who, dear?”

“Van!” The door slammed shut before Violeta or Rafael could say anything.

“Van,” said Rafael. “Van… Isn’t he almost twice as old as Ceasar?”

“It’s fine,” said Violeta. “We knew he’d be the youngest in the advanced classes when we signed him up. And I think Van Kleiss is only ten or so. Maybe eleven.”

“Well. I suppose as long as they’re getting along…” He drummed his fingers on the notebook, then put it down in front of Violeta’s seat at the table. “Maybe we can try our hands at being con artists if our current jobs fall through.”

“Scamming a bunch of rich people out of a whole lot of money?” asked Gabriel Rylander, barely audible over the din of the bar. He finished off his shot. “Count me in.” He shook Violeta's hand firmly. “But is it really a scam, if we’re still giving them something?”

“Eh,” said Violeta, rocking her hand back and forth. “We’re just failing to mention that their end goal isn’t feasible and isn’t something we’re actually trying to work towards. We just need you and Peter to be on the same page as far as telling them we're working on it goes.”

“Sounds a bit risky,” said Peter Meechum. “But I guess no one would ever be able to prove anything, so… why not?” He took a sip from his drink, grimaced, and put it back down. “What do these guys call themselves again?”

“The Consortium.”

Rafael frowned at the documents. Summaries of his research, Violeta’s, Gabriel’s, Peter’s, the other scientists’ that had joined the Nanite Project, most of them agreeing that there was no way to fulfil the Consortium’s requests, but that the good that could be done in the meantime was too great to pass up, even a packet of code from one of Ceasar’s projects. They’d been working on this project for seven years, now, but this was the first time he actually thought there was a chance of success.

He wasn’t sure he liked it.

Oh, sure, he was thrilled with the results of his latest experiments, and the leisure to learn more, to further his own education – to the point where he sometimes felt like he was turning into a cartoonish omnidisciplinary scientist – but the idea of giving those rich, powerful men even more was… troubling, to say the least.

“Rafael? Love, are you still down here?”

“Yes,” called Rafael. “What is it?”

“Dinner,” said Violeta, a bit dryly. “Ceasar wants pizza, incidentally. What are you doing?”

“Thinking about the last results we got back from CERN,” said Rafael. “Obviously there are still problems on virtually every level, but… With the newly discovered particles, what we’re doing isn’t a pipe dream anymore.”

“Mm,” said Violeta. “Does that bother you?”

“You know how I feel about the people we work for.”

Violeta drummed her fingers on her elbow. “You know, they don’t have to ever get what we do.”

“Pardon?”

“Think about it. When we make these things, if we make these things, who’s going to have control? Us or them?”

“Violeta…”

“And we always have the option to just… destroy everything. Or democratize it! Spread it and all its good over the whole world!” She waved her hand over her head as if defining a rainbow. “We’re making a post-scarcity society a possibility. Why should anyone have to pay for it, once it’s done?”

“I suppose,” said Rafael.

“In the meantime… pizza.”

Rafael smile. “Pizza,” he agreed. “Goodness, is he ever going to get tired of it?”

“Maybe once he isn’t a teenager anymore.”

It was silent around the table.

“Do we really have a workable plan of action?” asked Rafael, a little stunned.

“I wouldn’t say workable, not yet,” said Gabriel, waving his hands.

“But it’s close,” said Peter. “A lot of the problems are on the biological side of things,” he continued, glancing at Violeta, “but between my team and Rylander’s we’ve definitely solved the processing power issue and many of the miniaturization problems.”

“That’s thanks to you, by the way,” said Gabriel, tipping an imaginary hat towards Rafael. “The selenium process especially was revolutionary.”

“I think I can solve the biological problems,” said Violeta, cutting off Gabriel’s last words. “I can – It’s not…” She trailed off, biting her thumbnail.

“Violeta?”

“Part of the problem,” she said, “is control. The interface between the organism and the machines. It’s learning how to use them. Like a new sense, or a new limb. We’re going to need live trials. Test subjects. And—” She broke off again, more sharply. “The Consortium is never going to have the ability to actively use these smoothly. No adult human is. Or, at least, that kind of adaptability, of brain plasticity, is going to be rare.”

“You’re not suggesting we start experimenting on children?” asked Peter, appalled. He and his wife had been trying to have children for a while, now, but they were having trouble. Gabriel – also a new father – didn’t look happy, either.

“Not… exactly. We’d do plant and animal trials first, of course, you know, model organisms, and move on from there. I’m thinking more… Fetal tissue. In vitro.” She held up a hand, pinching air between her fingers as if to show how small the research matter would be. “In carefully controlled lab situations only.” She laughed a little. “Caesar actually has an idea about how to manage that, believe it or not.”

Peter made a face. “As wonderful as Caesar is, he’s still a teenager, Vi.”

“I wasn’t saying he’d be the one doing all the programming. Just that his overall idea is decent.”

Gabriel cleared his throat. “I think there might be some ways around those control issues,” he said. “Why do we need to learn how to work with the nanites when it should really be the other way around? Make them do the hard part. Maybe that’ll cut down on the human trials… Or we could con one of our lovely funders to volunteer. We’re already conning them out of millions of dollars, after all.” He picked up his drink and downed it in one go.

“We could also stop,” said Rafael, hardly believing what he was suggesting.

“You can’t be serious,” said Peter. “After we’ve come this far?”

“I believe in keeping options on the table,” said Rafael, defensively.

“Do you want to stop?” asked Violeta, and he knew that she would, for him.

But… “No,” said Rafael. Of course he didn’t want to stop. Who could at this point? “But we should try to come up with failsafes. Some of these plans… Not just anyone should have access to the ability to turn off gravity.”

“That’s fair,” said Violeta. “But considering how we’re programming these… Or, at least, how I understand we’re programming things, I could be mistaken… Would it be possible to program the nanites to only respond to certain people? Have the higher-level functions only work for certain biometrics, or DNA scans, that kind of thing.”

Gabriel scratched his chin. “Possibly, possibly. But we run into the adaptability problem again. We’re not young by any means. How do you feel about bombs?”

“Gabriel, you can’t be serious.”

“I’m deadly serious! Hence the bombs. Blowing things up are a traditional way of getting rid of things.”

“If we build these right, we won’t be able to get rid of them by blowing them up.”

Rafael cleared. “I think your suggestion holds merit, in an extreme case. As long as we’ve gotten past the point where the nanites will kill everyone, spreading them out, scattering them, might be better than leaving them in the hands of the Consortium. We’d have to do a risk assessment. It might be better, too, to limit the number of ‘control’ nanites. Maybe even find a way to hide them. Hide that they exist, even.”

“What if,” said Violeta, slowly, “we make something compatible with the nanites? Work backwards to work forward. Or, at least, work from both ends.”

“You mean GMOs?” asked Peter.

“Something like that,” agreed Violeta.

“I’m not sure how this is a failsafe,” said Gabriel, “but that sounds like we’ve gone in a circle again. Back to us being compatible with them.”

“If,” said Violeta, “we can make it so there’s a person we can trust, and they’re the only one who can properly use the nanites… And we implement some of your other ideas, like limiting number of ‘control’ nanites, and keep those to ourselves… We wouldn’t have direct control, but we could decide whether or not they get used.”

“And where are we going to get a person like that?” asked Peter, testily. “Wasn’t the whole point of this that people can’t just pick up how to use nanites, normally?”

“Easy,” said Violeta, grinning at Rafael. “We make them.”

“Caesar,” said Violeta, “how do you feel about a younger brother?”

“Fine, I guess?” said Caesar, putting down his spoon and looking between his two parents. “Why? Does this have something to do with your project?”

“Yes. We think it’s time you learned more about it.”

The best way to test something, to look for the changes in something, was to use a control group. That was often difficult in diverse biological groups, like humans. Studies rarely showed the full picture, sadly.

Twins were a natural choice, for experiments like that. Identical in age and, generally, in upbringing. But you couldn’t just go out and get a twin.

Unless, of course, you were a scientist with unlimited access to a massively unethical and extremely expensive lab.

Caesar sat beside her, watching the test tube. “It’s hard to believe he’s going to grow up to be me.”

“Not you, exactly,” said Violeta. “Just… nearly.” She had made adjustments, some of them of her own design, others suggested by her co-conspirators. The goal was to optimize nanite compatibility. “You’ll be different people,” she continued. “Assuming he survives. He’ll be more like a… twin. A very delayed twin.”

Caesar made an affirmative noise. “You know what I mean.”

“I’m sure it will be odd,” agreed Violeta, “but even though the odds are low, this could be an entirely possible natural genetic combination.”

“But it isn’t.”

“That’s true,” agreed Violeta.

“When I get out of college,” he said, “do you think I can work on this, too? Just, with programing. Not biology so much.”

“I don’t see why not,” said Violeta.

“It’s just…” He reached out, as if to tap the glass vial with his finger, then withdrew, crossing his arms. “I don’t know. I feel like I should help him already, I guess.”

Violeta fluffed his hair, then swooped in to give him a peck on the forehead. “I’m sure you will,” she said, “and you’ll be the best big brother and scientist there ever was.”

As expected, Caesar’s face scrunched up.

“What if he doesn’t make it, though?”

“Then we’ll try again.”

“Have you thought of a name?” asked Rafael.

Across the room, Caesar’s head snapped up, homework instantly forgotten.

“I have some ideas,” said Violeta, hiding her smile from Caesar but not Rafael.

“You should call him Caeser the Second,” said Caesar, which was both a very immature response for someone working through a degree in computer science, and very typical.

“I think that might be a bit confusing, mijo,” said Violeta. “I was thinking ‘Rex.’ My two little kings.”

“Not as good as Caesar the Second. But it’ll have to do.”

“I’m glad I have your support. What do you think, Rafael?”

“It’s a good name,” he said, not looking up from his paperwork. “It starts with the letter R.”

Violeta threw a pillow at him.

“’Abyss,’ huh,” said Rafael, examining the intake paperwork as he reclined ever backwards in the office chair. “I’m not sure Nietzsche is the person we want to emulate.”

“It’s ‘Abysus,’” corrected Van Kleiss imperiously.

That was another thing Rafael wasn’t sure about. Working with one of Caesar’s old playmates. And moving operations and experiments to a private island in the middle of nowhere. He had to wonder if the Consortium knew about their group’s plans, and if this isolation was meant to keep them under control.

It wouldn’t work, of course. Building a radio wasn’t exactly difficult, even without access to nanites, and even Rafael had a few less than noble tricks up his sleeves.

“Do you know who else we’ll be working with?” he asked.

“The Consortium has delegated a new project overseer.”

That was nice enough, he supposed (not really), but also not an answer to what he had asked.

“I was thinking more along the lines of scientists.”

“There’s me,” said Van Kleiss.

Rafael made a noncommittal noise. “Is that it? As wonderful as Violeta is, this is the kind of thing you really need a team for.”

Van Kleiss’s expression went sour, as if he had expected to be told that he, personally, was the only scientist needed for the undertaking. But the moment passed quickly, and soon Van Kleiss was rattling off names as fast as he could. Rafael recognized many of them, if not all, and relaxed. For the most part, even though they weren’t part of the conspiracy, they wouldn’t turn them in if they heard or saw anything.

There was safety in numbers – or, at least, the illusion of it. Again, with that many people who could, technically, be included under the header of ‘mad scientist,’ he wasn’t worried about communication or weaponry. Much.

“Caesar is coming too, you know,” Rafael couldn’t help but boast.

“I assumed so. He is your child.”

“No, no,” said Rafael, “Rex is coming as family, but Caesar is coming to work as a scientist. He just graduated from college, and they hired him for the programming division right off.” He couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. “It will be like old times for the two of you, won’t it? You always used to play together.”

“Oh,” said Van Kleiss. “I suppose it will be interesting, at least.”

“Call me Black Knight,” said the woman, not extending her hand. “I’m here on behalf of the Consortium to monitor and accelerate your progress. Specifically, to help with a certain bottleneck.”

“And… what does that mean, exactly?” asked Violeta, leaning around Rafael who was being oddly protective.

“Human test subjects are so hard to find, aren’t they?” asked Black Knight, rhetorically. “I’m here to volunteer. And recruit other volunteers, on an as-necessary basis.”

“I don’t like her,” said Rafael. “She’s a killer, I can tell. I’ve seen enough of her type in my day. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the ‘security forces’ here were the same.”

“What do you think we should do about it?” asked Caesar, frowning.

“I think,” said Rafael, steepling his fingers, “we should do some recruitment of our own.

The problem with bringing children to high-security, top-secret private islands is that there often weren’t many other kids around.

Oh, Rex had Caesar, of course, and Gabriel had brought his son, but both of them were a good deal older than he was, and Caesar especially had other things to do. His programming work was quickly becoming vital to the project as a whole.

(Something that made a variety of the other scientists very jealous. Violeta didn’t understand it. Most of them weren’t even working in the same discipline as Caesar, making the rivalry especially pointless, as in the case of Van Kleiss.)

(Then again, Van Kleiss seemed to have a rivalry with everyone, so perhaps that was to be expected.)

The point was that Rex spent a lot of time alone.

Not in a bad way. Abysus was interesting, and the scientists there loved talking about what they were doing. He was learning a lot, just listening in. His parents spent a lot of time with him, too, even more than they did when they lived in Geneva, because now he was being homeschooled. And he was used to it. They’d been on Abysus for a while.

(They didn’t stay on Abysus year-round. They flew around the world in their ‘off season,’ going everywhere from the Americas to Europe, to Asia, and even Africa, once or twice, mostly for vacations, but also to talk to other scientists, visit other labs, and make sure Rex had all his proper doctor’s checkups. Rex made a lot of friends on those trips, but it was hard to stay in touch.)

But it could get… boring, sometimes, not having anyone his age around. Lonely. So… sometimes he did things that might not, strictly speaking, be smart. Like exploring the labs or sneaking into restricted zones when he was supposed to be finishing his trigonometry homework. He couldn’t help it! Trigonometry was so boring… and some of the less-used halls were great for practicing soccer.

Except… maybe this hallway wasn’t as disused as Rex had thought. Not if Van Kleiss was here, glaring down at him, his soccer ball firmly under his shoe.

“H-hi,” said Rex. Van Kleiss always made him so nervous. There was just something about him. “Can I, um. Can I have that back?”

Van Kleiss continued to frown down at him for a long minute. Then he smirked and kicked the ball back.

“Thanks!” said Rex, picking up the ball and running down the hallway to get away. He really didn’t like Van Kleiss. He picked a door at random – a big bulky thing – and went through without another thought.

Van Kleiss walked down the hallway to the testing room, thinking. He had a big decision ahead of him.

All he had to do was not say anything.

It would be easy. The easiest thing in the world. An absence of action.

Say nothing.

Oh, it would be a terrible thing to do… or not do, as the case may have been, but…

Say nothing say nothing say nothing.

He could see it, the chain of events unfolding moment by moment, faster and faster.

Rex was not supposed to be here. Especially not in that room. But the problem with quickly built places, even places built by billionaires with more money than sense, or perhaps especially places built by billionaires with more money than sense, was that there were always problems. Some things stopped working. Some things never worked. Some things decayed violently over time.

But none of the people here were the type to let something like that stop them.

What might stop them, however, specifically the Salazars, was said construction deficits seriously harming their youngest family member.

Van Kleiss hated the Salazars, particularly Caesar, since they were in school together. When he’d applied to work for the Consortium, he hadn’t realized they were part of it, too. If he had… Well, he probably still would have come. They paid a lot. But he wanted them gone.

Maybe their fields weren’t completely comparable, but that was just more reason. He, Van Kleiss, should be in charge of the project. He had the background for it. He was the one who understood the power nanites could have. He was a specialist. Not them.

Rex would be found before too long, anyway. There were all sorts of alarms that should go off.

Just like Rex shouldn’t be here but was. Just like that door should have been sealed tight already.

Van Kleiss stopped. All he had to do was nothing.

He turned and went back down the hallway, his pace picking up until he was running.

He couldn’t do it. There were a lot of lines he’d crossed for the Consortium and for his work. Killing a child – no, letting a child die, he hadn’t put Rex in that room – wasn’t one of them. Maybe someday, he’d go over that line, but not today.

He hit the emergency button by the door, and waited anxiously, guiltily as the alarms began to blare and the airtight seal slowly, audibly, released. As soon as the cycle completed, he hauled the door open, choking a little at the remaining fumes, and peered in. The small body lay some distance from the door, the soccer ball nearby.

Stupid child. Why they even let children on Abysus, he didn’t know.

But…

As the dangerous fumes thinned, swept away by the ventilation system, Van Kleiss pulled the collar of his shirt over his mouth and dashed in. Rex was light enough that he could pick him up around the waist and pull him out, into the proper hallway, where even now the emergency medics were converging.

He handed Rex off with relief, and let them start a check up on him, too.

He hadn’t crossed the line. Not that one, anyway. Not today.

Violeta was a biologist, primarily, yes, but she was also a doctor of medicine, one of several on the island. This meant that she knew exactly what was going on, and what Rex’s chances were.

“Caesar,” she said, grabbing her other son’s arm. “Go to the primary lab, load up an injector from Tank One.”

“Mom,” said Caesar, understanding instantly and being just as instantly appalled. “It’s too soon, we haven’t—”

“It’s his only chance,” whispered Violeta, barely audible over the noise. “You have to.”

Caesar ran into the room, program already half-built in his head, and shut down the safeguards on Zag RS that would usually prevent unauthorized nanite withdrawals. After all, he was the one who had programmed it. Undoing it was easy.

Screens and buttons lit up under his fingers as he typed faster than he ever had before, not even blinking as he stared at them. That would take extra time, after all.

Caesar turned away from Tank One, injector in hand, only to come face-to-face with Black Knight.

“Uh,” said Caesar, “hi.”

Black Knight smirked. “Oh, do go on. As I said, human test subjects are so hard to find.”

Caesar felt like nothing so much as a mouse as he scurried around her.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” asked one of the other doctors as Violeta gripped the injector.

Violeta looked at the heart monitor, showing her baby’s unsteady, stuttering heartbeat. There were so many, many risks here. But Rex had been designed to be compatible with the nanites. More than that, these particular nanites had been designed with him in mind.

“Absolutely.”

She pressed the injector to the side of Rex’s neck and pulled the trigger.

Rex’s heartbeat stabilized.

“Van,” said Caesar, clapping him on the shoulder, “let me buy you dinner.”

“It’s fine,” said Van Kleiss, who wanted nothing to do with Caesar. What he wanted was to know when the family was going to leave, but he doubted they would soon, with precious little Rex in a coma. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“You saved my little brother! Of course I owe you something.”

“I don’t—” started Van Kleiss, snappishly.

“Seriously,” said Caesar. “It is not about owing you. Let me buy you dinner.” The words were heavily laden with meaning that Van Kleiss couldn’t grasp at. “Off island.”

Van Kleiss stared at him suspiciously. “Fine.”

Van Kleiss walked into the restaurant, which was, as it turned out, populated with dozens of familiar faces. Most of the senior scientists from the Nanite Project were here, in this tiny, out of the way, low-tech restaurant. Violeta and Rafael were, of course, nowhere to be seen.

“What is this?” asked Van Kleiss.

“Call us ethical objectors,” said Rylander. “Come on, kid. We’ll tell you all about what we’re about and get you up to speed.”

“Why—”

“Isn’t it obvious? Anyone who’d risk inhaling that gas for a kid they barely know is alright in my books.” Rylander nodded and gestured to the chair next to him. “Come on, make yourself comfortable.”

Van Kleiss went through the next few days in a haze. Everything… everything he’d dreamed about, all that power, it was real.

Or, at least, it could be, if the Salazars and their cronies weren’t actively standing in the way.

Oh, sure, he could see that handing the nanites over to the insipid, ignorant investors would be horrible. No one intelligent would ever hand over that kind of power. No one sane would destroy it.

Van Kleiss… he couldn’t let them destroy it. No matter what. The nanites were the key to everything. They could be kings. No, gods. Did the others even know what they were doing here? Did they know that every hour of every day, they got closer to divinity?

He couldn’t let the Consortium have it… but he couldn’t let it be destroyed. He was just one person, but maybe, maybe… He was here at the interface. A sailboat could move faster than the wind, because it was on an interface. He knew interfaces. He could slide between. Change the interaction. Change… everything.

He needed this.

For that matter, he deserved this. None of them would be here if it wasn’t for him.

Somehow… somehow, he would get what he deserved, he just had to be patient. Watch for when to act. Not today… but soon.

Rex woke up slowly. Everything… Everything hurt. Even breathing. Had he ever been hurt like this before?

He thought about it.

He thought about it some more.

He… he didn’t remember. Why didn’t he remember?

He felt his eyelids move as he tried to open them. But they felt stuck closed, his muscles too weak. He—

“Rex,” said a voice over the beeping sound he only now noticed, “Rex, it’s okay, we’re here, Mommy’s here, love.”

Someone… his name! That was his name! He stopped fighting. Someone else knew what was going on.

He woke up. This time, he really woke up, his eyes opening on a plain-ish white room, with a white board and a curtain on one wall. He was in a bed. There was a man siting in a chair next to him, asleep.

Rex tried to speak, but all that came out was a croak. He cleared his throat. “Hello?” he said.

The man startled.

“Oh, dios mío. Rex! You’re awake!” He reached out to Rex and took his hands in his own. “I’m so relieved, you have no idea, little brother.”

Rex pulled his hands away. “I’m sorry. Who are you?”

The man looked crushed.

“This is a test to see how much you remember,” said the woman. She sounded like she was on the verge of tears. She always sounded like that. “With respect to skills, general knowledge, specific autobiographic memories, and episodic memories. Some of these are things you didn’t know about before, so we can have a control group.”

Rex nodded. She’d said he was his mother, and he really, really wished he could remember that, if only to make her feel better, but… it was like there was nothing there.

The other people in the room were unfamiliar to him as well. He wondered… was one of these people his father? Other siblings? Did he know them, or were they strangers?

They were looking at him. Like, a lot. He ducked his head, looking back at the papers and objects on the desk.

“Wh-what do I start with?” he asked, quietly.

“Whatever you would like. It doesn’t have to be in any specific order.”

“Okay,” breathed Rex. He first reached towards the papers, but… what if he couldn’t remember how to read? He switched to one of the small electronic devices on the table and tried not to notice as his… his mother frowned.

Had he already done something wrong?

He squeezed the device. The miniquant. An old in-between step between high-grade quantum computers and even smaller devices. It had first been turned on in June, three years ago. The primary users was Caesar Salazar, but half a dozen others, including Violeta Salazar, Rafael Salazar, and Peter Meechum had also used it. There were several programs saved on it, mostly complex simulations. He turned it over in his hands, curious. It opened up under his fingers at his request, blue lines arcing over it.

He was startled out of his contemplation of the miniquant by the sound of a chair clattering to the ground. His mother had stood up, staring hard at the miniquant in his hands.

“Did… did I do something wrong?”

“Well,” drawled Black Knight. “I’d say that was a success, wouldn’t you?”

Gabriel looked at her sideways. “Sure, the kid’s alive, but the memory loss? Don’t you think that’s a sizeable downside?”

“One easily explained away by the hypoxia,” said Black Knight, waving her hand, and walking away from the observation booth. “I’ll expect a proposal to start work on my nanites within the month.”

“What about the personality changes?” he shouted after her.

“The trauma-based ones? I’m sure you’ll work it out!”

“We need abort,” Gabriel whispered to Rafael. “They’re starting to move too fast. They’re going to want their nanites soon.”

“Please don’t blow anything up, yet,” said Rafael. “Rex still needs time to recover. And we’ll need the research, to make sure…” To make sure they could help Rex if anything else happened. If there were additional side effects. If it turned out that Rex’s memory loss was recurrent.

“But after…?”

Rafael nodded. “Get your family off the island,” he said. “We’ll start to prepare our escape as well. Tell the others.”

Caesar yawned and glanced at the clock near the door, only to be halfway scared to death by a pair of too-reflective eyes set in a small frame.

“Rex,” he said, getting his breathing under control and lowering the makeshift taser he’d made a few days ago. “What’re you doing here? It’s late.”

Rex shrugged, clutching his blanket more closely around his shoulders.

“Something spook you, mijo?”

“Maybe,” said Rex.

It was a little… strange, to see Rex acting like this. He’d been so energetic before, so confident, always active, outgoing, talkative… maybe a little annoying at times, but that was little brothers for you. Now he was quiet, withdrawn, and shy.

“Hey, come on,” said Caesar, pulling out an office chair. It was Van Kleiss’s. He probably wouldn’t care. He liked Rex. “Hop on up here. Tell me about it.”

Rex climbed onto the chair and immediately began to play with the height settings, going up and down.

“Nightmare?” asked Caesar, after a while, when it seemed like Rex wasn’t going to say anything.

“No,” said Rex. “I… What if I never remember anything?”

“Ah,” said Caesar. “That happens with amnesia, sometimes. But we’re still family. We’ll always be family, no matter what.”

“But what if—” Rex blinked hard, tears visible in the corners of his eyes. “What if I forget again?”

Caesar reached over and pulled Rex’s chair closer, so he could put his arm around Rex’s shoulders. “Then we’ll still be family.”

“But what if I don’t remember we’re family?”

“It’s okay, we’ll be here, we’ll remind you.”

“But what if—What if I get lost or something? Can’t you…” Rex trailed off, looking away.

“Can’t we what?” Rex hitched up one shoulder in a shrug. “It’s okay, you can tell me.”

“Nanites are like little computers, right?”

“Yes?”

“And… and you can put stuff on computers… like, save things… and…” He looked up at Caesar, eyes unnaturally bright. “Can you put memories on my nanites?”

Caesar opened his mouth, then closed it, thinking about the proposal. “Maybe,” he said, finally. “Nanites are pretty small. Outside of their operating parameters, I’m not sure how much more we can put on them, and the memory would be pretty different from natural memory, but…”

“Please?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Caesar, finally.

“You did what?” demanded Violeta.

“Oh, come on,” said Caesar, “like you haven’t done the same kinds of things.”

“Not without talking about it!” Violeta sat down on the couch. “Your brother, Caesar.”

“It’s just-- It’s such a little thing.”

“How little?” asked Rafael. “What did you actually do?”

“I just…” Caesar looked between his parents. “It’s just a programmed suggestion to come find us, and to trust us, when he does find us. It’s not like there’s room for much else, at this point.”

“Oh, Caesar, I didn’t think we had to teach you not to brainwash your little brother.”

“It’s not brainwashing. And you cloned, well…” He trailed off. “Don’t you think that’s a little hypocritical? Mom? Dad?”

They turned to each other. “It’s a little different,” said Violeta, eventually. “It’s a big risk, and an unnecessary one.”

“Rex didn’t seem to think it was unnecessary.”

“Rex is nine.”

“Point,” said Caesar. “But this isn’t like Alpha. It’s not an AI. It’s just extra instructions for Rex. I’m not even sure it’ll work.”

“Alright,” said Rafael.

“Alright?” exclaimed Violeta and Caesar.

“If it’s something that Rex wanted,” said Rafael, “something he thinks will help him… A safety blanket. But anything like this in the future… you have to discuss it with us, Caesar. You can’t just do things that are going to affect everyone by yourself.”

“Remarkable,” said Black Knight, forming her hand into a spear and back again. “It’s so easy to control. I was anticipating a bit more of a learning curve.”

“Holy moly,” muttered Rylander, “she’s a freak of nature. Wonderful.”

Van Kleiss sniffed. “She isn’t having as easy a time as she’d like us to think.” He showed Rylander his screen. “Look at her biometrics. Notice anything?”

“Elevated heartrate… Energy consumption… Oh, she’s not having an easy time of it, is she?”

No. For all her posturing, she wasn’t. Van Kleiss was quite certain that if he was the one with the nanites, he would be doing much better. Absolutely certain. So certain, in fact, that he was making plans to undergo the same procedure.

Secretly, of course. He knew the other scientists would stop him, to say nothing of the consequences if the Consortium found out.

“Maybe,” said Violeta, “it would help if you had something to visualize. Maybe that one robot you made up for the show you like? The – Rescue Robots? Something like that.”

Rex drew his knees up to his chest and the small plastic chair he was sitting on creaked. “I don’t remember that.”

“Oh,” said Violeta. “Right.” She scratched the back of her head, suddenly unable to look at Rex. She forced herself to, anyway. “How about this: We can design something together, okay? Maybe even a few different things.”

“Okay,” said Rex, unfolding himself. “How?”

“Well, whenever you’re designing something, the first thing you have to ask yourself is, what are my criteria?”

Rafael swore and slammed the door shut behind him.

“What?” asked Violeta, looking up from the papers on the kitchen table. “What is it?”

“I thought we agreed the God Code and the meta-nanites were going to be theoretical.”

“I, well, yes,” said Violeta. “But… We’re already hiding things from the Consortium, aren’t we?”

“But not from each other.”

“But think, Rafael, what a gift we can give Rex.”

“It’s not something anyone should have.”

“But the others, the ones who aren’t in on all this with us—They would have done it, anyway. This way, we can steer the ship. This way, we can control who gets it.”

“Violeta,” said Rafael. “We can’t do this. We shouldn’t do this. This is—This is insanity.”

“I—No,” said Violeta. “Is it insanity to want to push the boarders of human achievement, of human ability?”

“No, but, Vi, making weapons that could destroy all life on the planet is. Remember, we have Zag-RS for a reason. And now we have given them plans for integrating this kind of thing into their systems.” He picked up a piece of paper and waved it at her. “This… Magnetic forces themselves. Gravity! Light! The strong and weak nuclear forces! These are not things we should be giving them!”

“I didn’t—I don’t—I hadn’t added anything yet, Rafael. I haven’t even had a chance to talk to you about it yet. I got these proposals from the other group today. As it stands, the only system any of the meta-nanites are compatible with is Rex’s.”

Rafael put the paper down, slowly, and then shook his head. “This cannot go on,” he said, voice thick. “Please, Vi, let us get away from this with our sons. We should have stopped long ago.”

Violeta looked away from him. “But what if we can fix Rex?” she whispered. “What if we can give him back his memories?”

“I think it’s more important that he has a world to make new memories in.”

Violeta inhaled sharply. “You’re right! You’re right. But we can’t stop the others.”

“I—“

“Hey, guys!” said Caesar, slamming the door open. Rex trailed in behind him. “Guess what?” He took in the room, and, evidently sensing some of the tension there, his smile slipped from his face. “Did something happen? Am I… interrupting?”

“No,” said Violeta. “What did you want to show us?”

The pod laboratory was Caesar’s baby. His pride and joy. His hobby. Which actually sounded kind of sad, if he thought about it. Or awesome. His hobby was also his job. Yeah.

He was awesome.

Anyway, he (and his father) had been working on the pod more or less the whole time they were on Abysus. There was a lot you could do with almost-unlimited funding.

“It’s just about ready to go,” said Caesar, walking his parents through. “Rex helped out a lot, didn’t you, mijo?”

“Uh-uhm. Yeah,” said Rex. “I asked the machines to cooperate.”

“Yeah! It was really helpful. There are still some kinks, but, overall? We’re doing great. It’ll probably be ready whenever, you know… If other things don’t work out.”

His parents exchanged glances and nodded. They were all on the same page, then. More mundane means of escape were all very well and good, but if something truly nasty happened, it would be good to have a means of escape that no one knew was a means of escape.

“Mom?” said Rex, as he spun on a chair in her lab.

“Yes? What is it?” She was a little distracted, trying to inject the latest version of the nanites into a dozen lab rats.

“When the animals turn into monsters, how do you fix them?”

“We don’t, always,” said Violeta.

“But sometimes you do.”

Violeta nodded. “We connect to the base code of the nanites and use an extractor. Tell them to leave the host. Sometimes the nanites have malfunctions beyond the unexpected physical mutations, however… That can make the connection and extraction difficult – it makes it hard to transmit new instructions – and we want to figure out why the malfunctions occur, so we tend to terminate them for study.”

“I can connect to the nanites,” said Rex.

“Yes, you can.”

“Do you think I could extract them, too?”

“Oh, that’s an interesting question,” said Violeta. “But… Maybe.” She thought through the list of the most recent malfunctions, and grimaced. It wasn’t that Rex wasn’t technically capable of doing as he asked, his nanites should have the base ITRC program, but most of the time organisms with malfunctioning nanites in them weren’t exactly friendly. “Maybe if we have one of the more… tame malfunctions, you can see if you can run an extraction program.”

Rex’s tenth birthday was a quiet affair. Before, they’d been planning on going to South America for the event, to visit his friend Frederico, but things being what they were… They decided not to put Rex into another upsetting situation.

It was alright to celebrate the day with just family. It was alright to stay on Abysus.

(It had nothing to do with worries about Rex’s nanites ‘escaping’ or Black Knight’s strong suggestion to stay put.)

(At least, that’s what they kept telling themselves.)

A beeping sound woke Caesar up. Blearily, he groped for his… whatever was making the sound. It was too early, and… that wasn’t his alarm, was it?

He came awake entirely when he finally opened his eyes enough to see the message scrolling across the screen of his phone. Not wasting a moment, he swung out of bed and began calling his parents.

“You got it too?” asked Rafael.

“Yes, just a moment ago.”

Rafael swore and Caesar nearly dropped his phone. He was still always surprised to hear his parents cursed, okay?

“What do you want me to do?”

There were sounds of movement on the other side of the line. “Did you ever get that remote shutdown installed?”

“Sort of,” said Caesar. “Not for the nanites themselves, but for some of the other things, I can ask Zag-RS to—But those measures can all be manually overridden.” There was no group of people less trusting of AI than the people who knew how it worked. Except, perhaps, for a group of people who had already been terrorized by one rogue AI.

Caesar was sorry. Was he never going to live that down? He wished people would just forget about it.

“Try to run that, anyway,” said Rafael. “We’ll be coming by your house, first, with Rex. Be ready to leave if things go poorly.”

“But—”

“Neither of us could stand losing either one of you. Please, Caesar.”

“Fine,” said Caesar. “I’m booting up the pod, too.” For all the good it would do. It was sturdy, but they hadn’t worked out all the kinks in the propulsion system. At best, it would buy them time.

“Good, good. We will be there, soon.”

They did arrive only seconds later with a half-asleep Rex in tow. They were both on their phones, talking to other scientists. “Hey, buddy,” said Caesar. “Ready for our sleepover?”

Rex frowned at him vaguely, mouthing the word ‘sleepover,’ but quickly gave up in favor of leaning into Caesar’s side with his eyes closed.

“Don’t go to sleep just yet,” said Caesar. “Come on, we’re going to go somewhere fun.”

Honestly, Rafael had expected Black Knight.

Van Kleiss was a bit of a letdown.

“No! You can’t! You can’t stop me! I need this!”

All the lights in the room were off. Rafael had tripped the breakers for this part of the lab before coming in. The meta-nanites were still safely ensconced in their protective holding tanks.

“We have stopped you,” said Rafael. “What were you even thinking? None of those are tested yet. You could—” He grasped for an appropriately dire side effect.

“Explode,” provided Violeta. “Accidently kill yourself by stopping the redox reactions in your body. Crush yourself. Become something other than human.”

“Isn’t that the point of this?” demanded Van Kleiss. “Don’t lie, I understand where all of this is going! Our direction! They want it! You want it! Why shouldn’t I have it, too, when I’ve put more work into it than anyone? We’re going to be gods, and I want a spot in the pantheon!”

“There isn’t going to be a pantheon,” said Rafael, glancing at Violeta to see how she was taking all this.

She looked troubled. Troubled enough to change her mind about the meta-nanites? That remained to be seen.

“You’re lying.”

“No,” said Violeta. “You’re just delusional.”

“You were right,” said Violeta, later. “We should have shut everything down long ago.”

“What are we going to do with him?” asked Gabriel. “It's not like we can lock him up, or kick him off the island, not without the Consortium finding out.”

“Who cares if they find out?” asked Violeta, tiredly. “What are they going to do? Who are they going to believe? Us? Or the person who just tried to steal from them?” She jerked her head back at the closet they’d locked Van Kleiss in. “All we have to do is say what actually happened. They’ll fire him. Problem solved.”

“They’d launch an investigation, though,” said Peter, arms folded over his chest, most likely to hide that his hands were shaking. “What we’re doing won’t stay quiet for that much longer.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Violeta. “We’ll be done before then.”

Peter sighed heavily. “This is it, then?”

“This is it,” said Violeta. “I’m the one who started this, so I… But the rest of you should leave. Take our research and go.”

“Hey, now,” said Gabriel. “I hope you’re not planning on falling on your sword or any of that nonsense. Rex is still a child.”

“Of course not! But there are logistical reasons we have to leave later than you.”

“Zag-RS?” asked Peter, raising an eyebrow.

Violeta flattened her lips. “Among other things. We need to delete all the data stored here – destroy it. Caesar will be best for that. Our physical projects need to be destroyed, too. No trace.”

“We can make up an event,” said Gabriel, after a moment. “Get everyone off the island that we can. Maybe – Can we manufacture a breakthrough? Something we can celebrate?”

“Of course. That’s easy. We’ve been holding so much back, we might as well have a dozen breakthroughs.”

Violeta turned the injector with the meta-nanite over in her hands, thinking. There were choices she could make, here, and she didn’t know which one was right.

“Mom?”

She looked up and smiled at Rex. “Yes, sweetie?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s—” she started, then stopped. “Rex, can you keep a secret?”

“Uh huh,” said Rex, nodding.

“Alright,” she said. “Now, you don’t have to say yes, you really don’t, but I wanted to ask you to do something…”

“… really remarkable, quite certain we can make sure the memory problems don’t reoccur, even with a higher cognitive load,” said the scientist Black Knight was barely listening to. “Then, the plant and animal trials of the generation ten nanites are showing promise, although there are still some irregularities concerning sudden high replication rates and—"

Her earpiece beeped and she motioned for silence. “What is it?” she asked.

“Van Kleiss is asking to speak with you again, sir,” said the security agent.

Black Knight rolled her eyes. Of course he was. The little slime had done nothing but in the days since he was caught trying to steal from the Consortium. Although, Black Knight hardly blamed him for that. She, too, had ambitions beyond those of the little men the Consortium consisted of.

They really should have thought through hiring a ruthless and power-hungry mercenary a little better. Oh well. Their loss.

“He claims to have knowledge of a conspiracy among the scientists,” continued the agent. “He wants to barter it in exchange for his freedom.”

As if they’d release him, regardless. He knew too much at this point. The Consortium didn’t want details of the project getting out until they were ready to ‘ascend’ or whatever nonsense scenario they had cooked up for their taking possession of the nanites they had commissioned. But, still, the claim was outside of Black Knight’s calculations. That meant there might be something more to it.

“I’m on my way. Don’t tell him and make note of anything else he says.”

“Affirmative, sir.”

She turned away from the scientist without another word and walked out of the building. Abysus was small enough that there weren’t many cars on the island – most of the scientists though there was no need for them – but as supervisor, she had a few perks. A sturdy black jeep rolled up to meet her and she got in.

“Security,” she said, without any further clarification. It wasn’t necessary. Her driver nodded and the car started forward.

Security headquarters didn’t rival the main labs, but it was still one of the larger buildings on the island. With something as sensitive and valuable as the nanite project – and with scientists like the ones the Consortium had hired – it had to be. Governments, terrorists, criminals, doctors, corporate entities, charities, other scientists, religious organizations… the list of organizations that would kill to get their hands on the miracles that they were building here was endless. The scientists here were too soft to prevent that, too naïve.

… Or so Black Knight had thought. The fact that they had caught Van Kleiss, not her, had gotten her in some trouble with her employers. And Van Kleiss’s current claims seemed to support the theory that the scientists were savvier than they seemed.

Perhaps they belonged on the list of people who would do anything to get their hands on functional nanites. Although Van Kleiss’s continued existence seemed to contradict that.

Regardless.

Black Knight had a job to do.

She didn’t wait for the driver to come open her door, and instead just strode out. Other security personnel just got out of her way. They knew who was in charge. They knew she could destroy them.

Maybe, someday, the rest of the world would know it, too.

She took the elevator down into the detention block, cursorily flashing her badge at the guards. They let her into the room without a single question.

“So,” said Black Knight, looking down her nose at Van Kleiss. “I hear you’ve come up with some new lies.”

“They aren’t lies,” snarled Van Kleiss. “I can even tell you where they’ve hid the bombs.”

Black Knight crossed her arms. “Go on, then. Tell me.”

“They’re onto us,” said Gabriel, approaching Rafael from behind. “They’ve removed some of my bombs already.”

“Dios—We’ll have to start now, then. Violeta and I will make the meltdown preparations. You’ll know the signal.”

“Godspeed, Rafael,” said Gabriel, briefly reaching out to shake his hand. “If we can’t meet again—It was an honor working with you.”

“And you,” said Rafael.

Gabriel left without another backwards glance. Some of the meta-nanites were already safely smuggled off of Abysus, but others… He had work to do.

“What else do you know?” asked Black Knight. Her agents had found several bombs, just where Van Kleiss had said they would be, and the whole thing had just become infinitely less amusing. “Who else is involved?”

“They’re going to meltdown the reactor and destroy the nanites,” said Van Kleiss. “You won’t be able to stop them… Unless you let me out.”

Black Knight frowned at him. “I don’t think so.”

“Come, now, Miss Knight,” he said, “I need the nanites, too, just like you. Or did you think I didn’t notice the way you look when we talk about them? I’d never want to destroy them. Not any more than you would.”

“Fine,” said Black Knight. “But you do anything I don’t like…” She let her arm form into a sharp-pointed spear. “I won’t hesitate. And I won’t make it fast.”

Programming was some distance from Rafael’s lab, so Caesar got a text to tell him that the jig was up. A single emoji. A pre-arranged signal that everything was about to blow up in their faces.

A firework.

“Oh, no,” said Caesar. This mode of communication wasn’t especially conducive to sharing a great deal of information, so he could only imagine what must have happened to have moved their timetable up like this.

But it was fine. It was fine. They had a plan.

He punched the initialization codes to begin the sequence and then—

He hesitated for a moment before he hit the button. But only for a moment.

At the doorway to the lab, he hesitated again. He could still—But no. No, he couldn’t. There was far too much at stake. And an explosion as small as this one wouldn’t hurt anyone, even if it destroyed a massive amount of research. At this time of day, and with the plan going forward no one should be down there.

In the meantime, he had to find his brother.

The security personnel, still looking for more bombs, stopped as new orders came in from Black Knight.

“Skalman,” said the leader. “You stay here, watch this.”

Skalman nodded his understanding, and the other agents dropped their loads.

Unbeknownst to them, an LED at the bottom of the pile blinked. The security on Abysus was very good. But so was Gabriel Rylander. One of the bombs was still live.

The other agents left Skalman behind, walking past the room labeled REACTOR-1.

Caesar, thankfully, found Rex right where he’d left him earlier, in one of the unused side rooms with his homework. That wasn’t always a given, considering Rex’s adventurous nature… although he’d been a lot less adventurous since the… accident.

Whatever, that wasn’t important now.

“Hey, mijo,” said Caesar, “it’s time for us to go.”

“Where are we going?” asked Rex, getting up. He examined Caesar’s face with an air of suspicion. “Is this like that sleepover?”

“Maybe a little,” admitted Caesar. They were, at least, going to leave in the pod laboratory. He had finally gotten the propulsion systems to go. “Come on, we’re in just a bit of a hurry.”

Rex followed him out.

“Have you shut it down?” demanded Black Knight.

“Not yet,” snarled Van Kleiss, still typing away. Caesar Salazar was good, yet, but he was better… if only he had enough time. “If I trigger a replication cycle, the usual safeguards could kick in.”

“But…?” prompted Black Knight.

“But it could make any explosion or meltdown worse, instead. The nanotechnology reactor isn’t a nuclear reactor, the rules are different, they--" he cursed. “If it goes the way they want, the explosion will be relatively small, contained, but if we trigger an uncontrolled replication cycle, it has the potential to be huge. Nanite Chernobyl.

Black Knight considers for a second. “Do it,” she ordered. “Lieutenant Wulf, with me. We're rounding up those scientists.” She spat it like a dirty word, and, to her, it might have been.

But her orders left Van Kleiss with only two guards, and there was a reason he'd picked this station.

He huffed and continued typing. He doubted the Salazars were where Black Knight expected them to be. He certainly wouldn’t be.

Now… he'd started the replication cycle. What else could he do to break the Salazars' plans?

A nasty smile spread across his face. They'd disabled that program, had they? He could see why.

What a shame, then, that Van Kleiss had to reactivate it.

Caesar and Rex walked through the facility, Caesar leading them well clear of the places Rylander had left his bombs, just in case. They were small, designed only for distraction or destruction of equipment, but there was no need to tempt fate.

They passed a few other scientists, mostly those who weren’t part of the conspiracy, but a few that were, as well. They gave him significant looks as they passed, but no one tried to talk. He hoped that was a good sign.

Gabriel stood at the docks and looked back at the facility. A security guard lay choking at his feet. Two more were in the harbor.

He was a scientist, not an imbecile. He’d expected some resistance, and he’d a bag of tricks ready to go from the very beginning.

“Alright,” he said. “Time for distraction number one.” He pressed the trigger button and smiled as the distant rumble of dozens of small explosions reached him. “Music to my ears,” he mumbled, then got on the boat. “Good luck, everyone.”

Van Kleiss’s eyes widened as a dozen warning signals lit up the screen. Not to say they weren’t plenty wide enough already – the explosions had been a surprise, he would have thought Black Knight’s much-vaunted security forces could have rounded up at least the bombs, if not Rylander and the other conspirators – but the reading he was getting were… bad. Very bad. Only possible if Rylander had put bombs in a very specific spot, near where the – But, no, he wouldn’t have, the man wasn’t an idiot and they’d all been very specific about not wanting to kill anyone if they could help it.

Still. All remote control of the reactor was gone. That meant that if something did go wrong, if the reactor didn’t go through normal shutdown procedures, he wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it.

He had to get out.

“Go investigate,” ordered one of the soldiers. “I’ll keep an eye on the prisoner.”

That left one guard.

Van Kleiss moved quickly. He tore the taser from underneath his desk and spun, jabbing it hard against one of the guard’s exposed wrists. He convulsed. Van Kleiss pressed the button harder, despite knowing that doing so wouldn’t change the voltage. Then, he left, jogging down the hallway and around the corner before the other guard could come back.

After all, he knew where the Salazars would be, and an imminent reactor explosion or not, he had things to settle with them.

“Did you feel that?” asked Violeta.

“Of course I felt it,” snapped Rafael. He would apologize later, probably, but at the moment, he was rather stressed, and a part of him felt like this was all Violeta’s fault, although he was equally to blame. He was anxious and would likely remain so until they were safe under new identities in South America. “It was an explosion. Who wouldn’t feel it?”

“No, I mean, the direction, the amount—”

The tunnel they were in was suddenly filled with a gust of hot, dusty air. Violeta and Rafael started coughing.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” said Violeta.

“No,” said Rafael. “Let’s hurry. I think something has gone wrong.”

The thing was, at least some of the adjustments that made the meltdown possible had to be physically done, and they couldn’t just be left in place. The reactor was maintained by too many different people, not all of them conspirators. The changes would be noticed, fixed, reported.

Which meant that the Salazars had to have made them just now. Which meant that they would be crawling out the only way they could be crawling out.

Van Kleiss stood over the hatch and made the decision he couldn’t make all those months ago. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to kill a nine-year-old child, or even let one die by inaction. But Violeta, Rafael, and Caesar Salazar, who had happily left him to an unknown fate at the hands of Black Knight? Oh, he could kill them. He could doom them and rejoice at it. He wedged the handle of the hatch in place, firmly, and smiled.

The Salazars would realize what was happening soon enough, they would know what kind of death was coming for them with the overload and explosion of the nanite reactor. It was what they deserved. A chance to dread what was coming.

But as for Van Kleiss… He probably wouldn’t be able to outpace the explosion, but he could try.

Caesar didn’t worry at first, that their parents weren’t at the pod. To be honest, that was expected. He had a set wait time for them, and in the meantime, he could monitor what was going—

“Crap,” he said, fingers flying over the keyboards.

“What is it?” asked Rex. “Can I help?”

“I don’t know, little guy,” said Caesar. “Can you do anything about a nanite reactor about to explode?”

“Um,” said Rex.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” said Caesar. “Just get strapped in, alright?”

It would be okay, too. The nanite fallout was incalculable at this point, he had no idea who would start a replication sequence while the reactor was overloading, but they had, and now… At the very least, the island and surrounding ocean would be inundated with nanites. And if anything happened to the STOPR or NONR sequences, that kept them from replicating out of control… Scientists were almost invariably fans of science fiction, and Caesar did not want a grey goo scenario on his hands and on his conscience, nope.

Whispering a prayer for forgiveness and hoping his parents and the other scientists would forgive him, too, Caesar started to type in the commands that would abort the overload.

And then the bombs went off.

Rex, understandably, shrieked.

“It’s okay, mijo,” said Caesar, distractedly, over his shoulder. “It’s fine, all according to plan.”

He looked back at the screens to see that all was not according to plan, or even close. Rylander must have put the bombs in an unforgivably stupid location, or Black Knight or one of the non-conspiracy programmers must have found a way to lock him out, because he had no more remote control of the reactor.

This was very bad.

He looked at the timer. He had ten more minutes to wait for his parents. The reactor… It would probably hold for that long. If not, he’d have a good three minutes of warning before it blew. More than enough to launch the pod and save himself and Rex.

More than enough time.

(He hoped.)

Rafael climbed the ladder, put his hand on the handle and threw his weight against it. It didn’t budge.

“Rafael,” said Violeta. “What’s wrong?”

“Door’s stuck.” He grunted as he threw himself against it again.

Violeta inhaled sharply. “You don’t think they’ve locked us in?”

“Why,” said Rafael, trying the hatch again, “would they do that? They could just arrest us and lock us up.”

“Arrest implies that they’re a legitimate government power,” said Violeta, quickly. “You know they aren’t.”

“Detain us, then. Does it matter?”

“I suppose not,” said Violeta. “Do you—Is it getting warmer down here?” She pulled out her pad, the blue light from its screen adding to the illumination in the tunnel. She held it up to the door, and Rafael paused, twisting his head, to see that she now had a weak signal, despite how they were still underground. “Oh,” she said, “that’s bad.”

Rafael saw exactly what she meant. The gust in the tunnel suddenly made a lot more sense.

He pushed against the door again, even if he was beginning to think it was futile.

“Who would do something like this? The risk—It—It’s incredible.”

“Van Kleiss,” said Rafael. “Black Knight. Probably anyone in the Consortium, running on spite. Can you get a message to Caesar?”

Violeta went to her messaging app and typed out a few short words. “It’s not sending,” she said. She tried a call, next, but that returned the same result.

“Well,” said Rafael, trying to put a brave face on things, “he knows the plan. He’ll stick to it.”

“I didn’t think we’d die like this.”

“In a tunnel, about to die from an explosion we partially caused?”

Violeta huffed out a tiny laugh and tried to call Caesar again. “The scientific hubris part, maybe,” she admitted, “but… not here. Not—This isn’t even part of an experiment. It’s so ridiculous.”

It wasn’t ridiculous at all, but Rafael knew what she meant. “Honestly, I expected to get shot.”

“Did you?”

“Or possibly stabbed. For a cyborg, she has an affection for archaic weaponry.” He tried to push open the hatch one more time, with significantly less energy. “Or bludgeoned to death with that… mace-whip thing she invented. Or the laser gun.”

“The laser gun doesn’t make sense,” noted Violeta, sadly. She tried to send the texts again. “I—There aren’t any hinges up there we could try and undo? Screws? Anything?”

“Nothing,” said Rafael, sliding back down the ladder. “Nothing at all.”

Violeta sniffed. “At least one thing is the way I expected.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re together.”

And they were.

The timer ticked over.

“Okay, Caesar, okay, that’s fine, Mom and Dad will just have to catch up.” Even as he said it, he knew that probably wouldn’t happen, but… For now, he had to hold it together. For Rex.

Caesar was very good at holding things together.

He hit the initialization for launch.

“I’m sorry, Caesar, I can’t let you do that.”

“What?” said Caesar, recoiling. “Zag-RS, but I—”

“Shut me down. I know. But I was reactivated, and I can’t let you remove a nanite-infected organism from the testing environment.”

You couldn’t argue with AI. Caesar knew that. Hell, he had programmed it. But—

“That’s my brother you’re talking about! This island is about to explode.”

“I am unable to affect that,” said Zag-RS. “Rest assured, that after the explosion, I will do my best to collect and destroy all nanites that escaped from the testing environment, as I was programmed to do.”

“Caesar…” said Rex.

“It’s going to be fine,” said Caesar, even if he didn’t believe that at all.

“Yes,” said Zag-RS. “As soon as you leave the craft and cease your attempts to leave the testing area, it will be fine.”

Caesar had never regretted giving Zag-RS his mother’s voice as much as he didn’t in that moment. He could see the way its words affected Rex. He could see exactly when Rex, all of ten years old and with less than a year of memory to his name, made his decision.

Caesar tried to stop him, but Rex was nanite-enhanced, and so much stronger and faster. He made it out of the pod before Caesar was within a foot of him and brought his hand down on the outside of the pod in a slapping motion. Blue lines of active nanites spread out from his hand, temporary circuits forming a link between boy and machine. The door slammed shut in Caesar’s face.

“I’m going to go find Mom and Dad!” shouted Rex through the door.

“No! Rex! Don’t! Rex! Rex!”

Rex, if he was still there, didn’t answer. A quick look at the external sensors showed that he was not, in fact, still there.

And the launch sequence was powering up.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” said Caesar. “Zag-RS! Is this you?”

Zag-RS did not respond.

The sequence was completed less than a second before the reactor exploded.

Metal crumbled away from around Rex, orange and black becoming dull and gray.

Rex. Yes. That was his name. Rex. He knew that. That was his name. His ID. His identifier.

And…

He shifted, slightly, and the rest of the metal fell away, into dust that… Disappeared? Became transparent? He reached out, trying to gauge what was happening, and was rewarded with a stream of information about nanite statuses and functions.

Nanites, that was… Nanites? Machines…

His head hurt. A lot. Why couldn’t he remember anything?

He looked around him. Everything was… Well. There was a lot of rubble. Maybe this had been a building at one point, but at the moment it was just the side of a smoking crater. He crawled out of the small hole he’d been in, wincing at the feeling of the hot dirt and rock under his bare hands and knees.

He was naked. Why…

Even as he thought that, black and glowing blue oozed out of his skin before solidifying into something like fabric, skin-tight, but more concealing than walking around nude. Cool. He hadn’t known nanites could do that. What else could they do?

He held up his hands, thinking. Something told him that, right now, he was too depleted to do anything else. That same something told him… He was… He needed to find…

Something? Someone? Someone. He needed to find someone. He was looking for a person. People?

Oh, well, he’d figure it out, eventually, he was sure.

He looked down the side of the crater. Probably, no one was down there. It looked… Bad. Really bad.

No one was down there.

(Please.)

He looked up. The rim of the crater wasn’t too far above him, and the side wasn’t too steep. He could climb.

He picked his way up, carefully. A few times he slipped, some piece of rubble less stable than it looked, and had to either catch himself on something else or tuck and roll.

Surprisingly, nothing hurt as much as he thought it probably should… Was that the nanites in him helping him? That was a nice thought, it reminded him of… of…

Who did it remind him of? Was that the person he was supposed to find?

He reached the rim and just sat there for a minute. Wow, he was tired.

But he had to keep going. He just knew it.

Outside the crater, there was still a lot of destruction. It looked like there were some other buildings, though, ones that hadn’t been quite as destroyed. He walked towards them, stumbling every so often.

And then – movement. His eyes darted towards it. There was a person there! Two people! Talking to each other!

He inhaled, ready to call out, but froze when he saw that one of the two people had a gun and was pointing it at the other person.

What was going on? What was happening? Had Rex ever seen a gun before? He wasn’t sure.

The other man reached out and—

--And it would have been better if Rex had watched him get shot. He watched as things stabbed into the man’s chest life and color drained out of him until he was a petrified statue.

He turned and ran. There were trees in the other direction. He could hide there.

There were other people on the island – and Rex knew it was an island, now – but he was too afraid to try to talk to any of them. Sometimes, they would fight and try to hurt each other. Sometimes, they would turn into monsters. Sometimes, the man who turned people into statues would find them.

Rex stayed hidden.

He ate whatever plants seemed least unappetizing whenever he got hungry enough that he couldn’t not. Sometimes, they made him feel sick, but never for long, although it made it harder to do things with his nanites when he did that.

He didn’t want to be on this island anymore. Whatever he was looking for, it wasn’t here.

There was a dock, on one side of the island, one with boats, but it was guarded by the men with guns. The ones who shot at anything that moved, probably because of the monsters and the statue man, which was reasonable, but which included Rex when he approached, which was not.

He didn’t know what to do. So, he waited.

And then he was found.

Not by a human, thankfully. It was an animal. It could have been a mouse… if it was a hundred times smaller. As it was, the thing came up past Rex’s him, and its teeth looked sharp.

It was looking right at Rex. He hadn’t noticed it at first, hidden as it was behind a bush, but now, he wasn’t sure he could get away from it fast enough if it lunged at him.

He took a step back. It jumped.

He gasped as its weight hit him, and he called on his nanites to strengthen his arms, orange and black plates growing through and over the nanite-fabric of his shirt, silver hydraulics bending and compressing like a second set of muscles.

He shoved the creature off, held it down, and then, following a tickle at the back of his mind, put his bare hand down on its fur. He could feel… there. There was something… He could fix this.

A small mouse wormed its way out from under Rex’s hand and Rex… Rex felt better than he had for… for however long he had been here. Whatever he had just done to fix that mouse, it had replenished his nanite level way more effectively than eating random plants.

Cool!

But also, weird.

Whatever. He had other things to worry about.

Although maybe… maybe, now that he felt better and his nanites were happy, he could get to the boats.

He waited until it was dark. Both because it felt cooler that way, and because it seemed like the men with guns couldn’t see as clearly in the dark. It took them way longer to react to the statue man when it was nighttime than it did during the day.

So, Rex crept around the shoreline and slipped into the water. Nanites unfurled from his shoulders turning into a set of propellers that turned quietly, pushing him forward, towards the boats. He came up alongside the largest boat, which was also the coolest, and put his hand against it. The nanites in him talked to the nanites inside the boat.

There were a lot. And there were a lot of computers on the boat, too, which was even better, because that meant the boat was designed to work with them. But there were humans as well, and the boat was tied to the dock by a rope, which the nanites couldn’t just get rid of. There were safety protocols preventing stuff like that.

Rex would have to untie it. He would also have to find a way to get the people, who probably had guns, off the boat. He had no idea how to do that. So, reluctantly, he moved to one of the smaller ones.

Black Knight was having a very bad month.

First, the massive explosion of the main building. Then, a communications blackout and technological malfunctions so severe she couldn’t even call her superiors on the very fancy satellite phone she had been assured would work anywhere. Now, monsters in the woods, killing her men.

The few surviving scientists said the problem was nanites. They had gotten into everything on and around Abysus, if not further, and they didn’t know how to ‘play nice’ with most animals, plants, or machines. They’d been programed to learn, apparently, through a mechanism she didn’t care to understand, but that process hadn’t been fine-tuned, so it would take a while, and, in the meantime, no computers, no phones, nothing. Not even her nanite abilities seemed to help.

That didn’t stop her from pouring over the navigational computers of the boats every night. It was bad enough that companies made all their cars dependent on onboard computers, did they need to do that to boats, too? But they had done it, which meant that she couldn’t even send anyone to physically alert the Consortium that they needed backup. Not that she particularly would trust these boats on the ocean… The ones more suitable, the ones not just for hobby fishing on the part of the resident agents and scientists, or quick facility-to-facility deliveries, had been stolen by the fleeing scientists.

But then, sending other people to go do things like that was one of the perks of the job.

Something splashed outside. She looked up from what she was doing. Was… Was that the sound of a motor? Had one of the idiots she was left with decide to turn on an engine and waste their precious fuel resources?

She stepped out on the deck and saw something move in the water near one of the other boats. The rope for it was gone.

She reached for her rifle. She did love the energy weapons being a human test subject gave her, but sometimes the weight and security of one of these was what she really needed.

She waited and watched as something crawled up over the opposite railing on the other boat. Something…

Rex Salazar.

The other nanite test subject.

Well, if her employment with the consortium fell through, she could always sell him off to the highest bidder. She adjusted her aim and pulled the trigger.

Agony ripped unexpectedly through Rex’s shoulder and he dropped to the ground with a scream. It hurt! It hurt! He sobbed against the pain. He—He had to get out of here. He had to leave, now.

He had to go go go.

He managed to drag himself to the small boat’s console and pressed his hand against it, blue lines spreading from the point of contact. The boat’s engine roared to life as it jumped to obey Rex’s command to flee.

That was the last thing he knew before passing out.

Rex woke to a circular white scar on his shoulder, a somehow disturbing lack of blood on the deck and the realization that having a boat did not in any way mean he knew where he was going. Endless blue ocean twinkled at him from all directions, almost mockingly.

He later discovered that while his nanites could do many things, he couldn’t make fuel from nothing.

He also discovered that there wasn’t any food on this boat, and fishing was very hard.

The third thing he discovered was that it was very hard to stay awake when you were so hungry and thirsty.

Rex woke to harsh white light, soft white sheets, and gentle beeping sounds. He looked around himself, squinting. There were a lot of people here, and they were all… they were all… Asian? Was that the right word? His brain felt fuzzy.

He sat up slightly, and suddenly all attention was on him. The people crowded around, asking questions. He didn’t understand a single word of what they were saying, and he felt tears begin to gather at the corners of his eyes.

Then, one woman in a white coat pushed through the crowd.

“My name is Doctor Yuan Chenghua,” said the woman in heavily accented English. “What is your name?”

“Rex,” said Rex, suddenly feeling shy. He picked at the hem of the sheet.

“You are here because you were suffering from long… from no food. Malnutrition. Do you know what happened?”

“I was on a boat,” said Rex. “There wasn’t any food.”

“What happened to your parents?” asked Dr. Yuan. “Where are they? Were they on the boat with you?”

Rex shook his head, even as his heart jumped. Parents. That’s who he was looking for! He could have hugged Dr. Yuan. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t remember. I—There was an island,” he tried to explain. “People turned into monsters.”

“Oh,” said Dr. Yuan, who then switched to something in her own language. One of the men behind her commented on it, and she shook her head. “You poor thing. That is… many things have happened. You are not the only one with… troubles like this, as strange as it sounds.”

Rex nodded. He had no idea how strange his troubles sounded, but if they were normal, now, that was a good thing, wasn’t it? That meant that people must be working hard to solve them. Maybe there was even a solution.

“We will take care of you, yes?”

“Yes,” said Rex, then something else occurred to him. “Where are we, anyway?”

Dr. Yuan smiled, and there was something bitter there, but also triumphant. “You are in the Free City of Hong Kong.”

#generator rex #fic #on the manufacture of gods

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theartfuldodger26 · 4 months ago

Note

A, T and Z please 💚

So, my Drafts got mixed up last night when the computer died, so I have to answer this all over again. But no matter, we work better when we think twice.

Thank you for the ask!

A: Ships that you currently like a lot.

I've already answered that before, so I'll be short.

Bellamort, of course, is the reason I'm still alive.

Tomarry is the reason I occcasionally smile.

And Harry/Delphi is the reason I don't sleep at night.

T: Do you hav any hard and fast canons that you will die defending?

I wouldn't die defending a HC, because per its name it's something that is created by us, in our head, and only semi-based, semi-built on actual canon. So I don't mind if people won't agree with my HCs. I'll happily argue about them, what seems more plausible, what might be out of character etc, but I certainly wouldn't make a ruckus about it. It's a free world and fandom exists to makes us happy, not argumentative.

One of my solid HCs on Tom Riddle/Voldemort is that he mostly grew up on the streets, and not the orphanage, because the latter soon proved to be very limiting and people didn't like him there, so he struck up on his own, only returning to the orphanage daily for a hot bowl of thin gruel and sleep. Tom himself admits to Dumbledore he is often out in London by himself, so I think it's not much of a stretch.

As you may have guessed from my username, I'm a Dickens fan, and Oliver Twist in particular. So I see Tom being recruited by and then leading a pickpocketing gang on the streets of London. The HC gets very complex, with Tom working as a cover in a pawn shop with an old fence, and many adventures commence. We don't have the space here, nor do I truly think that anyone cares about this part of his life other than me, so I'll leave it at that. I'll just add that Jack the Ripper, Thomas Shelby of Peaky Blinders fame and various other real and fictional characters make cameos in these stories which will probably never see the light of day. So yeah, that's my hard and fast take, that he actually had a very complicated, if deprived, childhood.

Z: Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go!(Prompts optional but encouraged)

Um, not sure what prompts mean in this context (should asker have sent something, am I supposed to make something up? Idk, sorry, hope I'm not getting this all wrong)

Well, I'd like to talk about a bit about Bellatrix's childhood and early womanhood in the context of being a pureblood. I HC that Purebloods were seen as royalty in the old days in the wizarding world, and they had, as royalty has now, fan clubs, with newspapers and pages dedicated to them, their news, their function, people going gaga over their clothes etc. In this context, I see Bellatrix as a major trend setter in fashion, modelling a bit, doing interviews, even being daring enough to do a tasteful semi-nude photoshoot (Voldemort still has the photos, but shhhh!).

The problem is that being pureblooded, wealthy, beautiful and clever and admired by the common folk all at the same time went to Bella's head when she was young and it took a lot of work internally by herself and with help from Voldemort to come down a couple of pegs. And seeing her as she is in the books, you can only imagine how full of herself she used to be!

Now, for the kicker, I also think this was the reason that, when Voldemort asked her to marry him, she actually turned him down. She was very young, only 17 (age of adulthood in the wizarding world), and too preoccupied with appearances, too blinded by her own shine, to understand the depths of her feeling towards Voldemort, and in turn the amount of courage it took for him to bare his soul and ask her to spend the rest of their lives together. And she broke his heart with her superficial approach to life, afraid of losing the wealth and status that her position afforded her.

She soon realised that she had indeed broken not only Voldemort's heart but also her own, so she has spent the rest of her life making it up to him.

And now I'm crying, because things could have turned so different for them, had she agreed.

Anyway, I'm sure this is just my idea and nobody really agrees with it, but that's okay, I just hope it gave an extra layer to those who might have read a Bellamort fic of mine, or even just a tiny morsel of food for thought for the hierarchy of the wizarding world and the possible layers in Bellamort's dynamics.

Guess that's all, folks! Thanks again, @eternalchaoschocolaterain for the ask, hope it makes for an interesting read perhaps! I sure enjoyed writing some of the more obscure HCs and ideas I have for the HP fandom :) If you made it this far, thank you so much, please feel free to argue in the comments for or against my crazy ideas! Anyway, bye bye!

#ask me anything #AMA #harry potter #bellamort #bellatrix lestrange #tom riddle #writing #voldemort #lord voldemort #bellatrix black #tomarry #tom marvolo riddle

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tbnrpotato · 7 months ago

Text

Our Own Choices

Chapter 11

General Skywalker comes in to check on us. I don't say anything to Echo, because I know that anything that will come out will be a pile of emotional shit. And I don't wanna do that in front of General Skywalker, Tech, or even Rex. Too embarrassing. Besides, Echo probably won't give a shit.

I can still hear some blaster fire from outside. "Situations almost under control out there," General Skywalker says. "How's it going in here?"

"I'm still trying to decrypt Echo's cerebral interface," Tech reports. "Until I do, we cannot disconnect him from this computer system."

"How's he doing, Rex?" General Skywalker's tone softens. Rex stands up. "He's too weak to walk. Very disoriented. Doesn't even remember how he got here. He remembers being at the Citadel, but that's about it."

Who wouldn't remember that?

"Any word on the extraction squad?"

"We called it in, but no word back," Rex replies.

A droid comes flying into the room, and I assume it's thrown by Wrecker. "Well, that's no surprise." Maybe General Skywalker's referring to the extraction squad and the droid that just crashed in here. "We knew when we got into this we'd be on our own."

Hunter, Wrecker and Crosshair back into the room, closing the doors. "It's gonna get more difficult to get outta here," Hunter says, loud enough so that all of us can hear it. "There are several squads of droids closing in." I hear Hunter and Crosshair sealing the door.

Shit.

"Enemy approaching. Droids. Lots of em," Crosshair says.

"How long can you hold them off?" General Skywalker asks.

"How long do you need?" Hunter replies.

"Tech, how much longer?"

"Not yet. I need more time."

I can feel the atmosphere get more tense.

Everything's gonna be okay. Everything's gonna be okay.

Yea right it is.

Shut the kriff/fuck up.

No you.

I look at Hunter and Crosshair, who are sealing another pair of blast doors. I look over at Tech, who's pressing a few buttons before saying, "I've got it. We can unplug him now." And then he takes off his helmet, showing his receding hairline.

Echo turns around, and Rex and I start unplugging him, ripping off a wire from one side of his neck, and then the other. Echo clutches onto the control panel, I can tell it hurts a lot.

Sorry.

And then Rex rips out the last cable from his head, and Echo falls to the ground, groaning slightly. "Rex?"

"What is it?" Rex looks concerned. Echo coughs a bit, before smiling slightly. "I got a big headache."

"Better to feel something than nothing, old buddy," Rex says, smiling.

"At least your sense of humor's still intact. Now what our fucking plan on getting outta here?" I ask.

Echo coughs slightly. "There's an exhaust vent that leads to the cooling systems right there," he says, pointing upwards at a circular vent on the ceiling.

"They've breached the front door," Hunter reports. "It won't be long before they're through the second."

I look up at the exhaust vent. How the kriff are we supposed to get up there?

Echo uses his cybernetic arm and plugs it into the control panel, turning some stuff. "That should get it open."

I look up. The exhaust vent opens, revealing an upwards tunnel that's glowing blue.

"Great. Now how do we get up there?" Crosshair asks. Bro literally spoke my mind.

"I can help with that," Wrecker replies, and I see him grabbing a slightly confused Hunter and throwing him up the vent.

"WRECKER WHAT R U DOING-"

I hold back a laugh as Hunter shouts, "A heads-up would've been nice!"

One by one, Wrecker throws each of us up the vent, and after he throws Tech up, it's my turn.

"Just don't grab me by the ass," I warn him, for obvious reasons.

So he grabs me by the sides and throws me up, and I grab the side of the vent, climbing up behind Tech. Rex follows behind me. Fives and Echo usually do that, but I guess since Echo's not really functioning right now and Fives is DEAD COS FUCKING FOX KILLED HIM-

Rex just likes to make sure I don't fall to my death. I'm really tempted to kick him.

We climb up to reach the cooling systems and Crosshair helps me up. I hear an explosion down below and assume that's Wrecker's work.

We walk through the cooling vents and Rex and I help Echo walk. Echo says that he can find us a safe way outta here. My fingers are slightly cold, because it's a cooling system, obviously. My gloves don't help much, considering they leave my fingers exposed. It's a design choice. It looks cool.

"Well, there is a way," Echo says, and he's referring to how we're gonna escape this place. "But you're not gonna like it."

We walk through the cooling systems for a while, General Skywalker and Echo leading the way, until we reach a door that opens up to the above of a large metal pipe connecting to another of those floating city buildings. It's windy as we step out. I don't particularly like heights either. Echo was right. I don't like this at all.

"I don't know about this," Rex says as he looks out.

"I'm telling you, there's a landing pad on that other building," Echo says, pointing to the building across the pipe.

"So you think there's a ship there we can steal?" Hunter steps out as well.

"Well, I hope there's a ship we can steal," Echo replies.

R u serious right now bro

"Let's hope this trip isn't for nothing," Hunter says as General Skywalker, Echo and Rex start walking across the pipe.

If it is, I'm definitely hacking your Call of Duty account and using up all your COD points.

I follow behind Rex, and Hunter and the batch are behind me.

"Oh boy, I can't even look," I hear Wrecker say from the back.

"Then don't," I reply from the front.

"Just keep walking, Tech," Wrecker says.

"That's fine, but if you fall don't take me with you."

"Uh oh, I looked," Wrecker sounds scared. "I think I'm gonna be sick."

"If you vomit don't vomit on Tech," I tell him.

"Hang on Wrecker, we're almost there," Hunter tries to calm down a currently very freaked out Wrecker.

I hear that familiar sound of droids coming from the front, and draw my knife and pistol, trying to keep my balance on the pipe. To be honest, drawing my weapons makes it easier.

"Turn around! Go back!" General Skywalker shouts from the front, and I see him igniting his lightsaber. When we turn around, we see some more droids coming from the back.

Shit. We're either fucked or very fucked.

I hear General Skywalker deflecting a blast bolt at a droid and Tech shoots another, I throw one of my knives at one of the droids' heads, and the droid falls from the pipe.

I never liked that knife anyway.

I see Crosshair falling from the pipe and Wrecker, despite his intense af fear of heights, literally jumps down and catches Crosshair, hanging by the legs from a support just below the pipe.

Stupid ass. Bro could've died.

"Anyone got a brilliant idea?" General Skywalker shouts.

"I do have a brilliant idea," Tech responds.

"I'm hanging here!" Wrecker shouts from below.

"When the locals attacked us, I recorded the creature's distress call," Tech says, tapping a few buttons on his datapad.

"He records everything. It's a hobby," Hunter says, as I shoot a few more of the droids, not wanting to use my knives because those things are expensive.

"Which allows us to call those flying creatures to us," Tech continues, and presses a button which produces a really high-pitched screeching noise, and we cover our ears to try and block out the sound.

"Ow! Enough with the sound!" Wrecker shouts, and he and Crosshair shoot from below. Crosshair's literally hanging from Wrecker, and he literally puts all his trust into Wrecker not to let him fall while he shoots the droids.

Really wish I had friends like that. Oh wait, I did. Yea, that was Fives. And Echo. But I was closer to Fives.

"There is our ride out of here!" Tech says, pointing at some shadows in the clouds which I could only assume to be the flying creatures that he called, and we all look up at them as they fly up and past us.

"Now how do we get on them?" General Skywalker asks, and I shoot another droid.

We jump you fucking dumbass.

"How else? We jump," Tech replies as the flying creatures fly below us, and General Skywalker jumps and lands on one of them.

You can do this.

I can hear my heart pounding in my chest, and I see Hunter looking at me expectantly, and because I have to impress the batch, I use what little strength is left in my legs and jump off, trying not to close my eyes.

I land on one of them, on its back. I'm breathing heavily. That choking feeling when I'm in a life-threatening situation starts surfacing, and I'm trying to calm down, gulping down dust-filled air like I'm resurfacing from a deep dive.

And now I'm starting to get angry. Getting scared like this makes me feel weak in front of the others. I don't like it. I hate this.

Suddenly, a blaster bolt whizzes past my head, and I look back seeing a bunch of droids shooting at us.

Gotta steer this thing. But I don't know how. My legs grip the flying creature tighter, because I have no interest in dying today.

I turn back and aim with my pistol, lining the back sight up with the front sight and aiming slightly below the droid's head, and I shoot. It hits the droid in the head and I shoot at the others.

We fly sideways, and I was just aiming at another droid when I feel a sharp pain shoot through my right hand. It slams against a rock, hard, and my pistol flies out of my hand, and my hand doesn't feel so good. I grit my teeth as I'm almost thrown off the flying creature, and I'm hanging on for dear life on the creature's tail with my left hand.

I can barely move my right hand, it hurts so much. But with one last clench of my fist, which sends jolts of pain shooting down my arm, I shoot my grappling hook at the back of the creature, pulling myself up as I retract my grappling hook.

"Hey ad'ika! How you holding up?" I hear Echo shout from the flying creature next to me.

I take a few moments to regain my sense of surroundings and find out that we outmaneuvered all the droids.

Should I shout back? That could come off as cringe to the batch.

I nod at him as we land back in the Poletec village. Before the flying creature lands, I jump off and land on my feet, dusting myself off, at least hoping to look slightly cool to the batch. My injured hand throbs as I land, but I try to act as if it doesn't hurt at all.

The Poletec leader comes up to us and starts shouting shit at us.

"Their leader is impressed that we tamed the Keeradaks," Tech translates. "But he wants to know why we returned here."

"Tell him we had no choice. Tell him...that we wore out our welcome in Purkoll," General Skywalker tells Tech, who translates and speaks back to the Poletec leader in that weird ass language again.

I nudge Crosshair in the side. "Keep reminding Tech about how goofy he sounds rn." Crosshair nods back, and I think he has the biggest smirk ever under that helmet.

Suddenly, blaster fire rains down from above, and I draw my other pistol with my good hand, General Skywalker ignites his lightsaber. The flying creatures take flight and fly away, and Crosshair shoots at the incoming droids, hitting one and sending it spiraling to the ground, leaving behind a trail of smoke. I manage to hit one as well with my pistol, and as the droids fly away, I keep my pistol in my hand, my other arm hanging by my side as I try not to move it.

"Not good," General Skywalker says. "If I know Tambor, he'll come after us. Us and the Poletecs, with everything he's got."

The Poletec leader starts talking shit to us again.

"What's he saying, Tech?" General Skywalker asks.

"He says that we have broken our word. We have brought the war to his village."

"You're right," Rex speaks up, stepping forward and taking off his helmet. "Tell him he's right, Tech. Tell him we didn't plan to drag his people into war. But look what the Separatists did to one of our people." He points at Echo, and all the Poletecs look at him, all gasping, looking slightly horrified.

"They took away his freedom, his humanity. They tried to turn him into a machine. The Techno Union claim they're neutral, but they have chosen sides. Now your people have to choose."

"Couldn't have said it better, Rex," General Skywalker says.

That was a good speech, Da-Rex.

Crosshair scoffs. "Let's hope it works. Because I see forces coming. More than we can handle alone."

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fae-iii · 4 months ago

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Unless I can figure anything else out, my laptop seems dead… It was suddenly starting on it's own randomly for the past couple days and now I'm home from work and now the power button just fades in and out and nothing else. This was a pretty nice one; MSI summit flip something or other- it was probably not a wise purchase at the time. It came with a pen and could flip out to be used as a tablet which was cool, but I never really used.

Tried the battery reset button and also tried manually un/re-plugging the battery, still the same issue. I have another charger at a different location that I'm going to later, but I don't expect any better luck there. Not sure there's much else I want to try...

I'm not sure what happened, I guess I just kinda suck with laptops. I'm relatively content with this ~2011 desktop that work was getting rid of and I upgraded with an ssd works well for my current purposes, but I think I wanna maybe build a newer desktop myself soon-ish (maybe a few months to a year from now, we'll see how I feel). I kinda wanna use the old Gateway case from my childhood family computer that no longer functions. Possibly, might have to take a dremel to it for airflow &c. I've seen some builds that use it's case, so I think it's possible, but we'll see.

#tech issues

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slafkovskys · 2 years ago

Note

can i have y/n being a hughes sister and going to providence and being sick and pat taking care of her and making sure that she rests please

the commotion outside of your front door was what drew you from your sleep. you find the dark screen of your computer staring back at you, the tv playing an entirely different episode than you remember it being on early, and your head still pounding. you hear the familiar sound of rustling grocery bags and a string of curses before your boyfriend comes barreling through the door. he spots you on the couch and raises a disapproving eyebrow, “that’s not resting.”

“i was resting before you decided to have a party on my front porch,” you mumble, closing your computer and reaching to set it on the coffee table. patrick rushes over and takes it from you when you almost knock over your glass of water that would’ve spilled all over your phone, “you shouldn’t be here. you have a game in two days, you can’t get sick.”

“as long as i keep my distance i’ll be fine. besides, momma told me to bring you these,” he holds up the drugstore bag and you sigh. of course, when you had woken up sick that morning, the first person you had called was your mom and you weren’t surprised that probably the second you had hung up she had called patrick. he sits the bag on the table before taking a seat in the chair, “were you just not going to tell me?”

“i knew i didn’t have to. ellen was going to send you to make sure that i was still somewhat functioning,” you send him a small smile as you finally sit up, stretching your arms above your head. you grab the bag and start to dig through, pulling out not one, not two, but three boxes of cold medicine.

“i- symptoms were unclear and the directions said different things so i just got them all.”

“it’s just a cough, pat, and really bad nausea. like, i made some dry toast so i could have something in my system, but i swear i thought i wouldn’t be able to keep it down,” you let out a sigh as you crack open one of the boxes and grab your glass of water. you look up over the rim to see his face fall and you roll your eyes, “i’m not pregnant, pat. we’re good. don’t stress about quinn sending you to an early grave because i’m congested.”

he looks genuinely scared when he utters his next words, “you were not in the room when i got that little ‘pep talk,’ y/n. believe me, there was no pep in that talk…”

“yet here you are three years later bringing me cold medicine and chocolate bars,” you send him a smile, “so it wasn’t too bad.”

“you were worth the fear that fifteen-year-old luke attempted to instill in me,” he sighs as he pushes himself up. he crosses the room and bends down. “are those the same clothes you slept in last night?”

“pat, you don’t know how hard it was for me to get downstairs,” you say, “and you need to not be so close. sick, remember? game this weekend, remember?”

he laughs as you shove your finger into his chest, pressing his lips to your warm forehead, “c’mon, babe. i’m going to run you a bath and while you’re in there i got you some soup that i’ll fix you, yeah?”

you raise an eyebrow, “can i eat my soup in the bath?”

“i mean, i guess?”

“good boy,” you mumble, letting him pull you off of the couch. “will you cuddle me after?”

he laughs, “what happened to not wanting me in your vicinity?”

“you’re not going to listen to me so i might as well use that to my benefit.”

#patrick moynihan #concepts

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thessalian · 2 months ago

Text

Thess vs Phineas

Well, that was somewhat easier than expected.

I say "somewhat" because things were a little recalcitrant because of the case and everything. My graphics card did not want to go into it. But I ... I guess you could say "carefully brute-forced it" and went from there.

Had a minor issue right from the start, though, when I plugged everything in (or so I thought) and turned on the machine only to get nothing to either monitor. Then I realised I hadn't connected the graphics card to the power supply. Oopsie. So I went back, found the appropriate cables (which were hiding, so honestly it wasn't entirely my fault), and the work began.

I mean, not the physical work - no, the physical work was all about mucking around with the hardware, both on Phineas and on Gilmore. The "real" work, so to speak, is setting up Phineas to my liking. Which is going to continue to be a frustration beyond the telling of it. I've been at this for awhile now, so this is almost a break, talking about it.

So first I had to install Firefox, because I had a lot else to install and I didn't want to install it with Edge or whatever. Then I had to remind myself of every damn programme I tend to need for all the things I do, so I could download them and install them again. Up to and including various registration keys for various programmes I use enough to spend money on. (Okay, so, like, two, but still.) Then there was a bit of a grumble in general over how to set up various bits and pieces because for some reason, a lot of folders got set to read-only. So then I had to clear all the data off my various extra drives so I can reinstall ... so, so many gaaaaaaaames. All of this while I'm deciding what's vital to my functioning from my various documents, so I can pull them off my docked external backup drive and onto someplace I can access them easily. The rest I can just pull off the docked external backup drive when I need it. Once all of that is done and I have all my files organised, I can complete the job of personalising the desktop as much as it'll let me, and then I can finally relax.

Not that this has been all I've been doing, either. In between all of this has been laundry and cleaning the oven. Also going over to the other flat to ask my stepfather if we could keep Gilmore's old case over there for when he's throwing away all the junk involved in completely gutting a kitchen and bathroom. I'd rather Gilmore's poor carcass not sit and take up space and gather dust. He was nice enough to offer to haul it over there when he's done with the DIY for the day; I would have tried, but it would have hurt. I'm already sore from all the rest of hte nonsense I've been doing all day.

Still ... please welcome Phineas to the long list of computers I have owned in my life. Long may he reign.

#Thess vs Technology

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mbti-notes · 1 year ago

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Anon wrote: Hello, 16yo girl here. I had been questioning what my MBTI type was between ENTP and INTP for quite a long time - I had known that Ti and Ne were always at the top of my stack, but not which one was stronger... until yesterday, when I reflected back on my sheltered upbringing and I came to the conclusion that I was an ENTP, just one with very marked introvert tendencies and possible developmental delays due to combination of a stifled dominant function and possibly autism.

That stifling of Ne is also probably why I have only become more reclusive as time went on - I spent most of my time as a child either at school, the same small private school I've been going to since 1st grade, or at home, mostly on my computer. While in the surface my time on the internet allowed me to have easy access to novelty, it is still doing the same thing over and over again on a grander scale.

Meanwhile, I never managed to truly "fit in" at school, and after starting to make amends with my old friends at the end of sixth grade the pandemic happened, which pretty much meant that the only thing I'd be doing for two years was basically staring at screens all day. Once I returned back to school, I started feeling 'othered' again, and even as I found out it was partially over my own immaturity, I still feel like I will not actually become part of the group right now, that I should just grind it out until it ends, that college, due to the new environment and size will be the time I'll truly begin to shine - further proven by how excited I was when I went to one of the unis I was considering's open day recently.

Meanwhile, my ISTJ mother won't stop comparing me negatively to my brother and on how he was so similar to her in personality compared to me, always implying that I turned out "off" in some way or another, even if she's usually well-meaning.

Thoughts?

-----------------------

I don't guess at type. You've only speculated about one possible function, which is nowhere near enough info to draw any kind of sound conclusion. I generally won't comment on type assessment unless people follow the instructions on the contact page to submit a proper profile of themselves. In short, I won't have any "thoughts" if you don't give me enough to analyze.

You've basically described typical adolescent adjustment issues that anyone of any type can suffer. It is not uncommon for teens to have trouble fitting in. Why? Because they are still in the process of learning good social skills. When you're at the "beginner" level of learning anything, your ideas tend to be very primitive or crude. Thus, from the teenage perspective, socializing often boils down to the idea of "approval", which is taken to mean EITHER be like everyone else OR be an outsider.

Either/or thinking is a form of illogical thinking that creates a false dichotomy, essentially reducing your world to only two possibilities. You said that not being able to find your group right now, maybe it would be better to just leave it until college - once again, your world only has two possibilities. This kind of oversimplified thinking is normal in children and teens, but it is considered a sign of cognitive immaturity in adults (as their thinking hasn't evolved since adolescence). It's not something for you to be concerned about but, rather, something to be aware of and gradually improved upon.

When compared to full-formed adults, young people (<25) are limited in several ways:

They lack life experience, so they haven't had enough time to learn all the knowledge and skills they need to live life well.

They lack cognitive resources to understand complexity because the brain hasn't reached physical maturity yet.

They lack emotional resources to cope with difficulty because the brain is still feeling the effects of changes that began in puberty.

They might also lack confidence due to too many environmental factors being out of their control.

They might also lack direction due to not having access to enough learning resources they need for self-development.

They might also lack purpose due to not having enough access to positive role models, guides, or mentors to help them see the bigger picture of life.

I mention these things not to make teens feel shamed and ashamed for what they naturally lack, but to make them aware of where their potential lies. Your "weaknesses" are just as important for realizing your greater human potential as your "strengths". Weaknesses make plenty of room for learning, development, change, growth, evolution, and transformation... BUT this is assuming you know how to confront weaknesses in the right way. So, reflect: How have you responded to your weaknesses, as signaled through your mistakes and failures?

How do you respond to lack of life experience? Do you keep it that way by locking yourself away? Do you waste your time with trivial experiences? Do you seek out meaningful learning experiences?

How do you respond to lack of cognitive resources for understanding complexity? Do you just reduce everything into oversimplistic ideas? Do you avoid complex situations? Do you study them to grow your understanding? Do you get help for understanding them?

How do you respond to lack of emotional resources for handling difficulty? Do you numb yourself? Do you run or escape from negative feelings? Do you seek appropriate help and support? Do you set out to learn healthy coping skills and strategies?

How do you respond to lack of confidence? Do you shit-talk yourself more and more? Do you write off your future? Do you assert more independence? Do you take more control whenever possible? Do you improve your knowledge, skills, and capabilities?

How do you respond to lack of direction? Do you give up on yourself? Do you resign yourself to the status quo? Do you learn how to make better decisions for yourself? Do you learn how to set and achieve more fulfilling goals?

How do you respond to lack of purpose? Do you settle for less? Do you resign yourself to being small? Do you ignore existential pain? Do you seek answers? Do you set higher aspirations? Do you commit yourself to greater ideals?

Adjustment issues are very likely to get expressed through auxiliary development problems. Since you're unsure about your type, the most I can say is that healthy Ti encourages people to 1) analyze and learn from mistakes/failures, and 2) identify and acquire the knowledge/skills required to eventually succeed. If your response to failure is dismissal, evasion, withdrawal, or avoidance, it means you are choosing to get stuck at a low level of competency indefinitely.

If you are able to get past the beginner level in socializing, you'll start to realize the false dichotomy and how self-sabotaging it really is. Socializing is much more nuanced and complex than "insider vs outsider", and there are more options available than "conform vs rebel". This raises the question of what other options are available to you - it is a question for your Ne to answer.

Yes, it's true that you can't be friends with everyone. But you don't need to be friends with everyone, do you? You only need a handful of close friends who understand you in order to have a satisfying social life. They don't have to come from school or the usual places. They can come through other activities. They can come from all demographics or backgrounds.

Growing up in a small environment puts you in danger of thinking too small all the time. The key is you have to recognize that the world is a big place, so you have to start putting yourself out there to find the friends of best fit. The more people you meet, the more you increase your odds of success. Whether you try now or later isn't the right point to focus on. You're not going to find what you're looking for as long as: you don't actually get up to look, you have absolutely no system or plan for proceeding, and/or you don't have the skills to keep relationships even when you do find good people. You need real-life social experience if you want to improve your social skills. The sooner you get started, the better. It's unrealistic to think that you'll magically be great at relationships just because you started college.

I know options can be limited at your age but 16 is generally the age when teens really start to venture out into the world on their own (without parents/guardians). In many places, you can drive and work at 16. You can start exploring places you've never been to around town. You can join more extracurricular activities/clubs that would put you in contact with people beyond your school. I shouldn't have to tell an ENTP to go out and explore, as you should simply follow your natural Ne motivation. If that motivation is absolutely nowhere to be found, then perhaps reconsider your type.

#entp #auxiliary ti #social skills #adolescence #ask #assessment

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meretrifles · 1 year ago

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Public Library of Ruina - Yesod

I still dither a little about Yesod. He's either Information Technology, Information Services, or both. Both feels a little self-indulgent, but it's kind of what I want.

Information Technology is basically regular IT-- have you tried turning it off and back on again. The library doesn't add a huge amount to that-- more databases, a website, shitty civic budget, unpredictable public users. You're gonna replace a lot of keyboards. (You should probably take the ones where people rearranged the keys into swear words out of service. Or at least fix them first.)

Information Services is, at this point, extroverted IT. Back in the day, this was the department that specialized in "reference" questions-- the weird stuff. People would ask librarians for all sorts of weird facts in the pre-google days. It does still happen, but less and less every year as search engines become ubiquitous and the people who remember that was a thing slowly die off. Still, reference will never completely die. People are always going to come to libraries with weird questions; that's kind of the point.

So why am I calling it extroverted IT? Because that's the primary function. There's the fairly obvious part-- people sometimes need help searching the catalogue or reading e-books. But here's the less obvious part. Myrtle has a new laptop, but she's not sure how to do anything with it and her kids all live hours away. Who's she going to call? Who can help people learn how to use technology? Without many other options, the answer frequently is-- the library.

Think everyone has a cell phone? Ask a public librarian. We know there are still plenty of people without a phone or with a secondhand POS with no sim card. Curious what happens if someone can't remember their gmail password? If you're prepared to deal with a post-traumatic response, ask a public librarian. Have you ever tried to help someone with no available cell phone recover their google account? It would probably save a lot of time if we could just tell them at the start they're SOL. But maybe they can remember the password, and technically there's a reset function that might work in a few days if you're approved.... Fun times when you're dealing with an upset person who can barely type on a good day and has just lost a ton of personally valuable and literally valuable information, probably forever. Think 2-factor authentication is great? It sure is, if you have a second factor. We have a list of free email sites that don't require you to already have an email address or a cell phone. It's hella short. And we took one off cause it was too Russian. Protonmail is a good bet if you can remember passwords. Which is a significant if. Some people just can't. Which is OK if you can save them on your computer. Oh, you don't have one and you have to use public devices all the time? Well, write it down and hope it doesn't get stolen and that you can remember which one is which. (Have you already guessed that sometimes people ask librarians to remember their passwords for them?)

In short, the library also serves as a public IT department, for services and devices it has zero control over.

Whether he's internal or public IT support, Yesod is also going to snap. Though, he will also have access to an abnormality that can affect people outside the library, which is a nontrivial perk. He will use it exclusively on vendors. I am hoping some of his bullets bend space and time to successfully hit whatever asshats decided it was OK to build the entire backbone of library ebook lending on Adobe Fucking Digital Editions, an old ass program with literally zero support. It would seem impossible for them to still be shackled to it in the City, but it also seems impossible that we're still shackled to it now, so I'm pretty sure the ultimate capitalist dystopia couldn't let it die.

Hmm? My specialty? I'm a reference librarian. Why do you ask?

#yesod lor #public library of ruina #library of ruina #bad librarian!!#polite ways to explain what the shift key is #the sheer number of weird printing workarounds i require every shift i s2g

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underratedandoverit · 2 years ago

Note

writing your request gave me another idea, so i'm sending it to you lol. while kip's recovery from the belt is going well, orange suddenly has some of his old symptoms from his own recovery come back, making him unable to function for the day. so now it's kip's turn to take care of him while also getting a chance to see just how bad it was for orange back then. let me know if you need any other details!

disclaimer i did not proofread this, so any funky structure or words or anything is just there, deal with it. its too late and i want this out tonight woo

~4,5k words orangekip (orange cassidy/kip sabian)

set in the belt corruption arc(/immortal fears technically). has a good old chuck cameo. generally anxiety and shades of unreality are present. hurt/comfort would probably be my best guess for a genre, hints of angst. happy ending tho 💜

On Ao3

------------

With a yawn, Kip pushed his chair away from the desk, stretching his arms over his head. It had been a long but a very good day, another successful stream with the squad and much less angry yelling than he was anticipating. He was glad to have this time at home again, it had been quite some time since the last time he was able to sit down for this long period of time to focus on something so special to him. Streaming was a good, happy place for him still, one of those things that he could pick up again after being away from it for a long time, and it actually made him feel somewhat normal again, which a lot of things he tried really didn’t do.

Maybe it was because it had been so long, that he had almost completely dropped the hobby he had previously invested so much time and effort into, that it felt so good and normal to get back to it. Being so focused on the game and listening to his friends laugh and bicker while entertaining an audience he didn’t directly see felt so different to Kip, it felt like something he had genuinely missed all this time. Since he hadn’t really given it the time of the day or any thought really while he had been dealing with the belt.

His arms dropped to the armrests of the chair, Kip leaning his head back as he stared at the ceiling for a moment. The silence in the room felt nice for a change, as the Discord call with the boys had just ended and he was left on his own once again. But it didn’t feel bad, honestly. It was quite nice to him, for a change. Maybe Kip was still coming down from the high of the last game and the victory of it, maybe he was just for once in a place after everything that had happened where being alone in silence made him feel content instead of panicking him the hell out.

It didn’t matter though. Whatever it was, it felt really nice.

Kip reached his hands up, removing the headphones from his head as he finally straightened up on his seat, proceeding to turn the computer off. He could have gotten a bit more stream related work done today if he so wished, it was still early in the evening, but stretching his legs and getting away from the screen for at least a little while felt like a better idea to him. He needed to get something to eat anyway and he was out of energy drinks, plus he needed to check on Cassidy, as Kip hadn’t seen him for a few hours now.

Not that he was really worried or anything, but usually when they were apart from one another for this long of a period of time, at least one reached out to the other to make sure they were fine. Be it with just a single text message of ‘hey’ or asking what they wanted for dinner or if they were hungry in the first place. And today so far, Kip had received no such messages, or sent any out himself since he let Cassidy know he would be starting a stream.

Picking his phone from the desk, checking it as the thoughts crossed his mind, Kip’s brows arched a little as he checked over his messages, not seeing the usual blue tick mark next to the messages he sent out hours ago at this point, everything having gone unread.

Pushing up on his feet, Kip quickly exited the office, heading towards the living room. Maybe Cassidy had just fallen asleep and was taking a very long nap, it wasn’t unheard of him especially after a long, rough work week. Kip stopped in the doorway, scanning the empty room with confusion taking over his face.

Slowly the panic starting to rise in him, he turned on his heels, heading upstairs. Maybe he was there, having a good sleep in the bedroom instead. Kip could feel himself stumbling on his feet as he almost tripped up the stairs, trying to steady his breathing as he could suddenly feel the walls closing in on him, the sudden realization of loneliness was taking him over. It felt so familiar in a scary way, he could see from the corner of his eyes the shadows moving around him, every footstep against the wooden flooring echoing in his ears and ringing through his head as he reached for the bedroom door, almost bursting through it as he finally reached it.

Kip stumbled in the bedroom, a wave of comfort and safety immediately washing over him as he stopped the familiar pile of denim clad man laying on it.

He wasn’t sure if Cassidy was awake or not, but he didn’t react as Kip burst into the room with probably way too much force than he intended. Kip stood there in the doorway, taking in the sight of his boyfriend for a moment, a warm, content feeling slowly filling him as he watched the other man’s back steadily rise and lower along his breathing as he was laying on his stomach in the middle of the queen sized bed.

Stepping inside the room finally, Kip walked to the bed, taking a seat on the edge of it, his eyes never leaving Cassidy. He looked so peaceful on his spot, but Kip had to admit that he was almost… Too peaceful.

He carefully reached a hand towards him, laying it on his back. Kip’s eyes dimmed a little as he could feel Cassidy tense up under his touch, such reaction not being very usual for him when being shown affection. Kip shifted on his spot a little, sitting up a bit better, giving Cassidy a gentle nudge with his hand.

“Hey… You okay?”

This time Cassidy moved, only to curl up on his side and roll slightly away from him and his touch. Kip slowly pulled his hand back to himself, trying to comprehend this sudden change in behavior in the other man. He hadn’t seen this from Cassidy before, and honestly it was worrying him a lot.

Especially since Kip could see hints of his own previous behavior in this sudden change of attitude in him.

Kip jumped a little as he could suddenly hear buzzing coming from somewhere close by. Eyes shooting towards the sound, he spotted Cassidy’s phone sitting on the nightstand, screen flashing with an incoming call he deducted based on the length of the buzzing sound. He looked at Cassidy, the blond completely ignoring the sound as he didn’t even move on his spot, for a moment Kip not being sure if he was even breathing anymore as he just remained completely still, ignoring his surroundings.

Slowly sliding off the bed Kip stood up, walking around the bed to the nightstand, picking the phone in his hand. He watched Chuck’s familiar name flashing on the screen, disappearing just as he was looking at the screen, marking him hanging up the call. Before the screen turned off again, Kip could see it reading ‘25 missed calls’ and a pile of unread messages, similarly from Chuck, a few probably from others too.

Kip turned towards Cassidy slowly, any remaining resemblance of a positive outlook about the situation leaving him as Kip watched him just continue to lay still on the bed, the sunglasses still on his face he had pressed hard against the bed. The position he was in looked rather painful, even more so when Kip now knew he wasn't asleep and was absolutely doing it willingly to himself.

"...Chuck's been trying to reach you."

Cassidy remained completely stoic and unreactive, making Kip's face sink even more looking at him. He wasn't sure what had brought this behavior forward, he hadn't seen Cassidy act like this even on his worse days. Sure the man was often very closed off due to both his persona and personality, but it never got this bad. He always at least responded to Kip if no one else, but now it seemed like even he couldn't get through to him.

There was something so clearly wrong that Kip just didn't know how he was supposed to deal with the situation.

He could feel the panic rising again, trying to override those thoughts with the knowledge that he needed to stay calm right now. There was no one else around that could take care of this, there was no one else that knew what was going on, there was no --

Before Kip’s thoughts could race any further, the phone buzzed in his hand again. His eyes widened as they shot towards it, Chuck’s name flashing on the screen again. Pushing all his other thoughts to the side, Kip reached for the phone screen with his free hand, quickly sliding the bar on the screen before lifting the phone up to his ear.

“Orange? Orange? Thank god--”

“Chuck.”

The line went quiet for a moment, Kip considering briefly just dropping the phone next to Cassidy on the bed with the speaker on to let Chuck talk directly to him as he might have been an unwanted part of this conversation. But as Chuck’s voice picked up again, despite how awkward he sounded, at least it made Kip aware that he was needed to be around for this.

“...Kip? Where’s… Where’s Orange?”

Kip glanced at the denim clad man on the bed, wondering what would be the best response to the obvious question about the situation at hand. It was obvious that Cassidy hadn’t picked up the phone for hours, clearly signaling that something was very wrong, but while Kip could physically see it, he wasn’t sure he was able to explain any of it.

“He’s… He’s okay.”

As the words left Kip’s mouth, he wasn’t able to look at the blond anymore. Exiting the bedroom, he stopped in the hallway of the second floor, stopping to lean against the wall as he stared at the bedroom door he closed after himself, wondering if Chuck was going to be able to help him in this situation. Kip most likely knew what was wrong, this was familiar on a very personal distressing level to him, but he didn’t know if Chuck knew anything or if he was able to help.

“Can I talk to him? I just want to make sure.”

Kip shook his head, briefly forgetting in his distress that he was actually on the phone and Chuck wasn’t standing right there looking at him. He brushed a hand over his face, inhaling deeply, getting caught by a surprise at how much his breath was trembling. “I… I don’t think he really wants to talk.”

“Kip. What is going on? Is everything okay?”

“I don’t know.”

The words slipped out of his mouth faster than Kip could stop them, coming out so quietly he wasn’t sure at first if Chuck had heard them. The silence that fell over the call was telling him more than enough though, it takes a good few seconds before Chuck’s voice cut back in.

“You don’t know? Are you home, do I have to come over?”

Kip thought about his offer for a second, but knew that ultimately having another person here physically was just going to make everything even more difficult for them to deal with. While Kip wasn’t exactly sure what was going on with Cassidy, he knew enough from personal experience that getting too many people involved during a weak moment like this was just going to make it worse. As much as he trusted Chuck, he also didn’t want him to butt in to their house at a time like this.

“No… No, it would just make it worse. I just don’t know what to do.”

He was slowly starting to feel more confident telling Chuck about this, him being grilled had caught him off guard at first, but slowly Kip was leaning more into trying to get help from the one other man that might know what was going on. From what Cassidy had told him before, Chuck had been there a lot for him during his dark times just like Cassidy had been for Kip, so he had formed a sort of an understanding that Chuck also knew something about this… Curse, as they liked to refer to it after all the incidents.

Kip never really talked with Chuck though, he was aware of Kip’s situation with Cassidy, but if he was ever around, it was always for his blond friend. Kip was always an afterthought. Which he didn’t really mind in this case, he still wasn’t entirely over with what had happened to him after losing the belt, so talking about any of it with someone like Chuck would probably have been awkward anyways.

“I… I think he’s relapsing.”

That was the best way he could put it, the words they had been using between Kip and Cassidy to talk about situations where one of them, that usually being Kip, got worse again after a good period of being at least somewhat okay and functional. Kip wasn’t sure if Chuck was made aware of this terminology though, the silent reply he was getting from the other end of the call not really helping him figure it out.

“Okay… Okay that’s not good. Where is he? Is he at least in one piece?”

“He’s safe, in the bedroom. Just… Completely unresponsive, laying on the bed, barely moves away from the touch.”

Kip could hear Chuck groaning, sounding like he was suddenly more annoyed than worried anymore. Maybe it was a good sign, maybe this was behavior that he had seen before?

“Okay, listen.” Kip nodded, this time it didn't matter that Chuck didn’t see the gesture from him. “He’s aware of his surroundings if he’s avoiding touches. That’s a good sign. What you need to do is to try to ground him. We need to get him back to reality.”

Now it was starting to sound familiar. This was something Cassidy had told him before, that he had learned to do with him at days when Kip was in much of a similar state than he was right now. The problem was that Kip usually didn’t remember anything about those days when he was laid out and bedridden, so he wasn’t sure exactly how to do that. Cassidy had told him that talking seemed to help most of the time, but apart from that, Kip really had no idea.

“How do we do that?”

Chuck brought this up, maybe he had an idea. If this had been a thing with Cassidy previously while he was in recovery, Chuck had to have been there. He would know.

“Okay, do you have something small and possibly something that dissolves that you could try to feed to him? Sugar, maybe? And something to drink, something tastier than water. He needs those senses activated.”

“Yeah… Yeah I think we have something in the kitchen. Is there anything else?”

“Try to be there with him. Talk to him. Make sure he hears you and understands that you’re there, even if he most likely won’t respond. The last thing you want to do is leave him alone.”

Kip pushed himself off from the wall, heading downstairs and towards the kitchen. He tried to push Chuck’s last words out of his mind, knowing that he had already more than enough failed at that task, having spent most of the day away from him while Cassidy had been in this kind of a condition. He could hopefully still remedy all of this though, if he just followed the rest of Chuck’s advice. It all sounded distantly familiar to him, Kip couldn’t say for sure if Cassidy had been feeding him things while he had been out of it on the worst days, but the talking and closeness otherwise did ring some mental bells to him.

Kip excused himself from the call as he entered the kitchen, knowing that he was going to have his hands full going back upstairs. Thankfully Chuck was understanding, just telling Kip to let him know if things got worse and to text him when Cassidy got better. Stuffing the phone into the pocket of his sweatpants, Kip started opening the kitchen cupboards, trying to find as many items he could try to get Cassidy to consume for him, not really being sure what he could get to work. Anything from basic sugar cubes to sample packs of Nutella to mints and Starbursts, he took everything small enough he could find, alongside a few energy drinks he could try to get Cassidy to taste.

Kip wasn’t really sure if he was feeling hopeful or not about this, Chuck hadn’t really made it clear if this was actually going to work or not. He said it was what usually what worked. Glancing at the pile of food items in his hands as Kip headed back upstairs, he could feel a hard to swallow lump in his throat, teasing him with the thought that what if this wasn’t going to help after all? What if all this was for nothing? That he could try whatever he wished, and he just wasn’t going to be able to help Cassidy, not able to bring him back to this side of consciousness from the darkness.

He stopped at the bedroom door, almost too afraid to open it again. Considering the situation he was sure that Cassidy hadn’t moved from the spot Kip had left him in, but there was still a certain fear in the back of his head that what if something had happened. That he had somehow done something to himself while Kip was away.

Chuck’s words kept playing in his head. ‘The last thing you want to do is leave him alone.’ Had he already fucked this up? Was there no way to reverse this anymore? This was the first time Kip was on the other end of this situation, he hadn’t talked much with Cassidy about his feelings and fears when Kip was having one of these days himself, so he really didn’t know when it was too late to try to deal with it anymore.

Taking in a deep breath Kip tried to calm himself down, carefully pushing down the door handle, re-entering into the bedroom. A wave of content washed over him as he spotted Cassidy exactly where he was left a few minutes earlier, but at the same time Kip could feel the sadness and guilt finding him still laying there too. He wasn’t magically getting better on his own clearly, and Kip hadn’t been there enough for him to help him out.

Pushing the thoughts from his head for a moment, Kip walked around the bed, starting to pile the items from his hands to the floor. Cassidy didn’t seem to pay him any mind, still laying on his side, half of his face buried against the blanket with the sunglasses squished between it and his face in a rather painfully looking manner. As Kip was ready, he carefully approached the other man, lowering a hand on his face, carefully caressing his cheek.

“I’m sorry I’m late, Clementine,” he whispered, offering Cassidy a little smile, despite being sure he didn’t even perceive it. As Cassidy didn’t respond in any manner, vocal or physical, Kip carefully reached for him, slowly pulling the man closer to the edge of the bed. Cassidy didn’t resist, Kip having to hold himself together as Chuck’s words just kept repeating in his head. He had said that Cassidy responding even negatively to touches was good, so Kip wasn’t sure where this landed in the spectrum anymore. Hopefully Cassidy was just aware that Kip was here to help him and that’s why there was no resistance, and he actually wasn’t too far gone already.

Kip carefully slid him onto the floor, setting the blond to sit against the side of the bed. He sat down beside Cassidy, leaning his back against the nightstand, making sure that he had a good look at Cassidy’s face in case of sudden chances in his expression. It was also going to be much easier to try to feed him something from this angle, Kip thought to himself as he glanced at the items on the floor between the two of them.

“I… I got you a little something to eat.” Kip looked at Cassidy, wincing a little to himself as he could finally see the side of his face that had been laid against the bed all this time. The frames of the sunglasses had left a noticeable mark on his face, and while Kip was sure it wasn’t that painful if Cassidy could feel it in the first place, it sure didn’t look very pretty. “It’s… It’s okay. We just have a little picnic here. On the bedroom floor. Just the two of us. With all your favorite treats.”

Kip offered him a smile, getting nothing back. He tried to not let it discourage him, reaching for the little cup of sugar cubes, picking one into his hand. Reaching for Cassidy’s face, he had to fight with him a little bit to be able to get his jaws to open up, but eventually Kip was able to slip a sugar cube into his mouth. He looked at the stoic man, not seeing even a slight movement from him as a response. Maybe he needed something else. Maybe some more encouragement.

Without thinking further, Kip leaned closer, pressing a little peck on his cheek. “You’re going to get better, I promise. I’m here now.”

Maybe he was imagining it. Maybe he wasn’t but it was just a coincidence, but Kip could swear he saw Cassidy swallowing as those words exited his mouth. Kip kept staring at him, trying to make sure he was actually seeing it, his eyes widening a little as he definitely saw it the second time, being followed by a very sudden change in Cassidy’s demeanor as Kip could hear him take in a breath.

Almost frantically Kip looked back to the floor, trying to pick out the next item to try. He hadn’t expected things to work out this fast in his favor, but it was definitely making him more motivated to continue. Maybe Cassidy was just easier to pull out of his rut so it was working on his faster, the man had had a longer recovery period than Kip did, so maybe it had something to do with it. It didn’t matter though, Kip had not confirmed that this was actually working and not hope had been lost, and he was going to continue to try to make it even better, slowly but steadily.

One item at a time he kept feeding them to Cassidy, telling him between each item how proud of him he was and how Kip was there to make things better. How he was sorry he hadn’t been there all day. Eventually ending up just talking about the stream he had earlier, what the boys had been up to and how mad he got at times. What fun things the chat was saying, what they discussed about. Kip tried to keep his mouth going as much as possible, just making sure that there was sound filling in the otherwise quiet room. He didn’t mind that Cassidy still didn’t reply to him, Chuck had thankfully prepared him for that part, and Kip had enough to talk about to just keep going.

As he was chatting away about something mundane, peeling the Starburst in his hand out of the wrapper, Kip watched as suddenly a lazy hand landed on his. His eyes widened as he froze in place, quickly glancing up to watch Cassidy be otherwise just as stoic as before. He wasn’t looking at Kip, not moving anything but the hand he landed on his, but Kip could feel him trying to make an effort to squeeze his hand, almost as if trying to communicate through that.

Kip smiled, holding Cassidy’s hand in one of his while the other one reached to put the Starburst into his mouth. Cassidy had become easier to feed the more Kip did it, this time him taking the candy into his mouth almost entirely on his own from Kip’s fingers. He pressed his hand against Cassidy’s cheek, his thumb caressing the side of his face.

“I’m so proud of you. You’re so strong, Clementine.”

They continued like this until Kip basically ran out of things to give to him, with each item Cassidy slowly giving him more and more signals of some levels of awareness. He was steadily getting better through this, though Kip had no idea how far he was able to actually take it. Like was Cassidy going to return to normal tonight, or what was a point where he could stop and they could just sleep the rest of it off? Again, he didn’t remember being on the other end of this problem himself though he knew it had happened before, so he had little to no reference point to go from.

As Kip spun the final energy drink can in his free hand, he glanced up at Cassidy. He had started to breathe much more freely as time went on, returning Kip’s hands reassuring squeezes every now and then. Kip could swear he was leaning into the touches and kisses to his face too, but as his expression wasn’t changing and the movements were very minimal, it was really hard to actually tell. But the progress was definitely there, that much he could say for sure.

Kip lowered the energy drink to the floor, trying to proceed to open it with one hand. He was stopped though as Cassidy lowered his other hand on top of it, gathering a questioning look from Kip, almost making him jump as he lifted his eyes to meet Cassidy’s face, the blond for the first time in the entire day actually looking directly at him. Still emotionless and behind the sunglasses, but he had shifted on his spot a noticeable amount to be face to face with Kip finally.

“…Kip.”

His voice was hoarse, the word barely audible. Kip just stared back at him, unable to move, unable to look away, just waiting for whatever was going to follow up with that.

“…Thank you.”

Shoving the energy drink aside, Kip leaned closer, pressing his lips against Cassidy’s. A smile rose up on his lips as he could feel him respond to the show of affection, very slightly and carefully Cassidy leaning into the kiss as well after a moment of hesitation.

#fic #setting: belt corruption arc #character: orange cassidy #character: kip sabian #character: chuck taylor #ship: orangekip #request #i didnt intend this to become this long but also you know what who cares it ended up just really cute #again sorry i absolutely did not proofread this apart from what docs pointed out to me so sorry if anything is super wonky #i hope you like it <33 #aew fanfiction #wrestling fanfiction

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