#and the worst batch all sort of stands and moves in sync when they first come out of the pods

[heyclickadee]

Reblogging again because I still like this, and I’m extremely torn between this and “he’s just CX-2 in every way and impalement helped.”

Also because this would be the funniest and/or most disturbing reason for Tech’s height in the databank to have changes from 6’4’’ to 5’11.5’’. He’s not any shorter than he was, but the poor guy he was piloting around was a standard clone 6’ tall, so he was essentially 6’ for a season.

Because I still think they’re bringing Tech back one way or another (in the immortal words of the late great Kanan Jarrus, “I’m being optimistic.”) and because I actually do need an explanation for why CX-2 was like that (because you cannot tell me we spent between 30 and 55 minutes, most of which was spent with just us watching him do stuff and not him interacting with the batch, on a symbolic construct—even if it’s not Tech, that’s an entire character at that point), here is another “CX-2 was Tech, but not physically” theory:

1. Hemlock captured and attempted to CX Tech. But, Tech being Tech, he resisted for months, and even once mostly CXd retained quite a bit of his personality in a way Hemlock found both interesting and a little worrying. Because of this, Tech became something of a special project. This is one of the reasons Hemlock never used Tech to threaten Omega—he wanted this particular CX-candidate under lock and key, and he thought that Tech had just enough personality while still in progress that he might relapse if he saw Omega, should Omega find her way to wherever Tech was being held the way she found her way down to Crosshair’s cell.

2. Since Tech was a special project, since finally well and truly CXing him (or at least getting him subdued enough to be under control, which I think is more likely) took time and effort, and since CXs don’t exactly have the best survival rate (Rex implies that he’s run into a slew of them, meaning they all probably died), Hemlock didn’t really want to send CX-Tech out just to have him die in two seconds. Alternatively: Hemlock CXd Tech just to see if he could work out a way to CX a defective clone, since it wasn’t working with Crosshair, but Tech was too badly injured to be sent out into the field without extensive cybernetics (if, say, his legs were toast after the fall or if he had a spinal chord injury that caused him chronic pain) that Hemlock didn’t want to spend money on only for him to die out in the field anyway. Or, maybe, he wanted to keep playing with Tech, because he’s Royce Hemlock and he’s a monster.

Then, either while looking for a solution for what to do with a CX project he didn’t want to waste, or as a motivation for why he worked so hard to CX Tech in the first place, Hemlock looked through Clone Force 99’s military records at one point or another and was struck by how effective a team of people with unique traits could be while working in together as a single unit. And, being the terrible mad scientist Silicon Valley startup CEO that he is, Hemlock decided to see if he could take that concept to a horrifying extreme.

3. So what he ends up doing with Tech is not that dissimilar from what Wat Tambor does with Echo. CX-Tech’s unconscious somewhere, down at the bottom of Tantiss, heavily brainwashed and sedated but still himself somewhere deep down, hooked up to some kind of apparatus, and Hemlock started using him to try to “drive” the other CXs with some kind of Avatar-style link. It becomes part of Hemlock’s updated CX process. That way the CXs can be really, truly interchangeable. (Bonus points if Tech was also the partially successful midichlorian transfer and Hemlock is taking advantage of that somehow to make this work. It’s bullshit Star Wars fantasy science—don’t think about it too hard.)

4. Though Hemlock may have tried this with others, the first CXs we see that he’s tried this with are CX-1 and CX-2. It marginally works with CX-1, to the point that Tech is there as an influence, but isn’t really in charge. He’s influential enough, however, that that’s why CX-1 reacts to Crosshair the way he does. CX-1 does know Crosshair from various conditioning sessions, but the weird beef CX-1 has with Crosshair, “If you want answers so badly, then why aren’t you asking him? Isn’t that right, brother?” and that weird warning he gives them, is all that little bit of Tech that’s sitting there in the back of CX-1’s head.

With CX-2, however, the link works so well that that’s just CX-Tech in another body.

5. Sidebar, but in this theory, it’s CX-1 who’s staring Crosshair down in Shadows of Tantiss. Or, it’s Tech staring Crosshair down through CX-1’s eyes. (One thing that has always bugged me about that shot is that the pose is 100% Tech, and we’re visually being told that it’s Tech with the armor and the lines on the wall, but that guy’s legs are proportionally just a little too short for it to BE Tech. Which could be explained multiple other ways, of course—Tech could have cybernetic legs that are shorter now, Hemlock could have gone in and surgically made his legs shorter to make him blend in with the other CXs better, they didn’t have the budget to make a Tech-specific CX model, who knows. But—I still like it being Tech without it physically being him in this shot.)

6. Another sidebar, but in this theory the reason the CX tracker isn’t something that will be picked up by a scanner is because the signal or link or whatever it is that Hemlock’s using to enable CX-Tech to drive the other CXs IS the tracker. Or the link is being established through the other CX’s inhibitor chips (which a scanner won’t pick up) or something. And when they die, the tracking signal goes dead, too.

7. Extra sidebar: Hemlock was originally going to use Crosshair for this. These were the “other plans despite his resistance to re-education” he mentions to Omega in Confined. Crosshair may or may not know this. Hemlock may have also point blank told Crosshair that he put Tech through the CX process and that Tech is “dead” in an attempt to break Crosshair, despite that not being literally true (in much the same way Wat Tambor said, “Your friend is dead,” about Echo to Rex in the TBB arc). Which just wigs out Crosshair even more when multiple CXs and especially CX-2 show up and start acting like Tech.

8. This was Hemlock’s plan for the Worst Batch CXs—basically, to have a group of CXs with unique traits all being controlled by a single mind. That mind being Tech, who he’s already got successfully “driving” CX-2.

9. Fast forward to the finale, Hemlock lets the whole worst batch out at once. This ends up being why the Worst Batch CXs have no personality, why Hemlock hesitated on sending them out at all (he wasn’t sure they would all even operate at the same time, and was so, so smug when they did), why CX-2 has so much less personality in the finale and only manages that one line, why they aren’t that big of a threat once the batch gets backup and aren’t being caught by surprise; why the worst batch CXs are so hard to kill and keep getting up, zombie-like, after they’ve been shot, why that one guy who gets his helmet knocked off walks around like he’s sleepwalking, and why the sword CX hands the sword over to CX-2. CX-2 gets more attention than the others because he’s the CX that Tech’s been driving the longest, so it takes less of an effort, but all of them collectively activated at the same time? Tech is having to drive all of them, and he’s just one guy. He’s stretched too thin and it’s almost too much to keep them moving. So they’re barely conscious and only half aware of what’s happening to them.

10. This would means that every single POV shot we got from either a tube or from a CX—because we get two from tubes, several POV shots from CX-2 including in the finale, and one significant one from CX-1—in season three is from Tech’s perspective, because he’s looking through all of them to one extent or another.

11. Whether some of the CXs survived or not—and I hope some of them did—Tech coming back and recovering in a later (possible follow up) showwould mean getting a some in-universe sympathy for the CXs that was mentioned in interviews but sorely lacking in the final product. They still would have been people under all of that, Tech would have “operated” them all to their deaths, and Tech would have been in their heads going through all of that with them as they died or got hurt. All of them, at the same time. And he would have been CX-2 (just operating in a body that wasn’t his) and done everything CX-2 did. That’s a lot to deal with. Bonus points if Tech mentioning that he was all of the CXs in the final fight and being in multiple bodies at once leads to Echo talking about what it’s like to scomp in from an internal perspective. Even if it’s just one line.

(For the record, I would actually quite like it if Tech was just CX-2 straight up and survived being impaled, and if the explanation was just, “CX-2 had to “die” and the pod that kept turning him into this had to be killed for Tech to start living again,” because it’s VERY Star Wars, but I’d be okay with this, too.)

[jamesandangelina]

“Here, take one of these, just in case the night takes a turn for the worst.” Angelina said, handing a small round item that looked much like an ordinary candy to Alicia. “You don’t think they’d realize if we used them?” her teammate and best friend inquired of the item in question. It was in fact a dose of Fred and George’s latest batch of fever fudge, only a few were even aware of its existence, Angelina and Alicia being two of them. “Like I said, it’s just a precautionary measure, plus I’m not entirely sure exactly how safe they are, Fred put himself in the infirmary for a week on a test from their last go at it,” she replied before putting one of the candies into her own clutch bag. It was that event that caused Angelina to question what Fred and George were up to and when she gave them the 5th degree for the entire week they finally brought her in on their project when Fred was well enough to leave the infirmary.

 “Ladies,” Fred and George said in unison to the two girls as they made their way down the winding staircase from the dormitories and into the Gryffindor common room. Each of them had wide grins plastered on their faces, and Angelina laughed a little as Fred took her hand and kissed the back of it lightly, “You look beautiful, Angelina,” he said as he stood back up, her cheeks warming to his compliment. She had to admit she was stunned when he’d asked her to the Yule Ball just a week before had, George had asked Alicia early on so the nerves of having to go solo crept up quickly. As Ron had put it less than eloquently it was okay for a bloke to go alone, but for a girl it was just sad. And as that statement made its way into her head the four of them passed Ron on the way to the great hall, which was quickly filling with students. He looked like the worst sort of tea cozy ever made, Fred and George poked fun at him as always, puckering up kisses at him and saying how their great aunt Tessy would be so proud.

 She had to admit as the night and the ball drew on Fred was making a much better date than she had anticipated, he’d actually been practicing his dancing skills and when they got the chance to go all out he literally took her breath away, spinning her in a dizzying amount of circles across the dance floor. She laughed as yet for what felt like the hundredth time that night he spinned her into someone else on the dance floor, “watch it!” she heard someone yell in a thick accent as she took his hand and they changed directions. When she finally felt dizzy enough the two retreated from the dance floor, finding George against the wall waiting for Alicia to return from the restroom. “How many people did you take out with those moves Freddy?” George asked with a smirk across his face, “Just enough,” Fred replied and Angelina laughed again, but that quickly changed as she saw that devilish smirk and poof of dirty blond hair coming their way. “Oy, Angelina,” Fred whispered as he nudged her with his elbow on her side, “we’ll leave you two alone,” and she looked up to her much taller mate with a glare of hate in her eyes, god they never let anything go.

 That “anything” for her in this moment was when her less than favorite person in the world, James Barsdley, had made a show of kissing her in front of the entire school the year before. She glared at him as she always did, folding her arms over her chest, wanting to tear that stupid grin from his face. He knew all the ways to get under her skin and all she could do was roll her eyes as he requested a dance out of her, knowing full well that Fred would let him steal her away from the rest of the night, just for his own pure amusement, “Uhg, fine, just don’t step on my feet.” When he put his hand to her waist, she jumped backed merely out of fright, because really, there they were again, in the great hall together and he was much closer to her than she preferred. When he questioned her about the night and they delved further onto the dance floor she couldn’t even look at him as she responded, “Yea, I guess it’s alright.” In reality she had been enjoying herself up until that moment, he just irked her in so many ways possible but she’d have to make due, she was stuck with him at least until the end of the song. “So just out of general curiosity, why is it that your date is dancing with Longbottom? Didn’t have enough charm to even hold onto Looney Lovegood for an entire night?” _________________  From: Ravenclaw's Chaser Date: 03-02-2014 18:04:08 This was going to be a long morning. The girls in the Ravenclaw common room were practically squealing as they saw one and another. James sat on the couch reading the article on Harry Potter in the Daily Prophet, only have listening to the conversations around him. "Did you hear about Cho?! Cedric Diggory asked her to the Yule Ball!" A small snort came out of him as he turned the page, the two third years glanced over at him. "Hermione Granger was asked by Viktor Krum! I would've never guessed that!" His voice was in a rather mocking tone, making the two girls roll their eyes as they left the room. He had enough of this, the Yule Ball was nothing to him. The plan was, go just to go...that was all. The night had very little importance to him. He was shocked that a few women from different houses had the guts to ask if he was going. All of them, disappointed when he announced with a group of friends. Cho had entered the room with Padma Patil by her side, "Your the luckiest girl in Hogwarts, Cho!" The Asian just blushed as she smiled, knowing she very well was. James had set down the Daily Prophet, Almost feeling sick to his stomach as their eyes met. "Whose the lucky girl, Bardsley?" She asked in a playful tone. His throat felt dry as he tried to swallow, making him frown some. "Nobody caught my fancy this year honestly... I plan on going with some friends tonight." He nodded, standing up on his feet so he could excuse himself to the Great Hall.  Luna Lovegood had sat by herself, once again. Quibbler at hand with some pumpkin juice in the other. James smiled as he took a seat next to her, stealing the paper from her hands to read. "You could've just asked..." She spoke, her voice always sounding magical to him. "Luna... do you have plans for the night?" The blonde blinked a few times as she tried to guess what he was implying. "I do...but are you?" James quickly interrupted her, answering her question "Will you go to the ball with me?"  The plan was, the two go and dance for a few songs. Luna seemed thrilled that she had someone to even do that with. Apparently she wanted to go with Neville Longbottom yet was sadden when Ginny Weasley was already asked. The idea was, James was going to make him jealous; which didn't mind him...he just wanted someone to go with now. It was almost time, everyone was locked up trying to get ready fast. James had worn something rather simple... A black set of dress robes with a white dress shirt. Of course he had to compliment blue in the tie, which was something his friends had decided to show their Ravenclaw Pride. His dirty blonde hair, a tangled mess always was brushed out some. He looked at his reflection, smirking as he tightened up his tie. Finally after this night, it'd all be over.  "My my! Aren't you a sight aye Weasel?!" James' voice boomed practically from the walls as he got his first sight of Ron Weasely. The ginger had an outfit to match his hair it looked. Laces, ribbons all over the place, just unflattering all together. Harry tried to hold back his laughter, covering his mouth with his sleeve as Ron rolled his eyes. "Knock it off! It belonged to my Great Aunt Tessy!" Just to annoy the man even more, he took a wiff of it and made a face "smells like her, too!" He grinned, feeling somewhat bad for him but hey.... Gotta poke fun at somebody. Just then a faint sound of a woman clearing her throat while tapping at his shoulders caused him to turn around. Luna had worn a light teal dress, her curly blonde hair pulled up in a rather messy ponytail. Her choice in jewelry was off to him, it almost looked like some nargols were hanging off of her ears. James smiled, bowing to his date before extending his hand to her. "Later gentlemen." He told the two, linking his arm around hers as he led her out.  "James you look rather dashing tonight!" Luna had told him, feeling anxious that she was actually going with somebody to the Ball. James smiled down at her and nodded, "I try, nothing but the best for my lovely date!" The word made her cheeks turn a bright pink, making her seem more adorable then she already was. The two watched as the Triwizard Champions danced, his eyes mainly on Cedric and Cho. "You still have feelings, don't you?" She asked, making him nod at the question. That was all he could say, yes. Luna seemed to push him out to the floor right after Neville and Ginny did. James followed, grinning as the two danced rather close to the other couple. She was light to pick up, in sync with the rest of the school he moved his date off the ground as it made her giggle. James just laughed with her as they continued to dance. The jealously thing was working, Longbottom was surprised Luna was asked by Ravenclaw's Chaser. It didn't take long for him to practically beg her for a dance. James secretly winked at Luna, giving her hand to Neville's and bowing before walking away from the dance floor.  Dance after dance, he watched them. Cedric and Cho seemed to be having a good time. He was practically sulking in his pumpkin juice. Same could be said for Weasley and Potter, the two looked down right sad. The Patil twins could've had better, he felt bad for them. Finally he got up, deciding he wouldn't let this night go to Hell like he originally intended. Angelina Johnson was sandwiched between the Weasley twins. He made his way over to them, giving them both a handshake. "Having fun, Bardsley? Noticed you were with Looney Lovegood earlier!" James just smiled and shrugged "She's a nice person once you get to know her..." His eyes flickered to her and Neville, making him smile more "Just wanted to help a friend out." Ang seemed to have this look of disgust on her face, making him smirk as his enemy on the field didn't care much for his existence. "Johnson, it would be my honor... If of course your date would allow... To share one dance with you." Fred and George seemed to other plans for the night, which included pestering both little brother and sister. So they left with a quick goodbye, leaving him alone with Ang. Without one word he placed his right hand on her waist and started to dance with her. "Such a nice night.,,, wouldn't you agree?"