EVENT: HERE THERE BE MONSTERS

[initiatesnpc]

Date & Time: October 24 - October 31
Location: Throughout Exsilium
Characters: ALL; tag yourselves in
Summary: The Transports return from their mission to find the island crawling with monsters.
Warnings: Violence, possibly injuries (notify a mod if there's cause to add a particular warning!)

The Transports return from their mission to Medieval Russia, but the Initiative Hold is eerily deserted. Normally, their would be a number of Initiative personnel prepared to meet the Transports at the end of their mission for debriefing.

Instead, there is only silence.

That is, until a distant thumping sound can be heard. It is growing closer, and suddenly the beast is bursting into the room. It lets out a roar and charges. Within minutes, it is easily defeated, but damage has already been done -- it collided with the Transporter machine, which is now making a low fizzling sound and lets off a couple sparks. The commotion is enough to draw the attention of the few remaining Initiative personnel who still inhabit the Hold, who arrive immediately afterwards. They are able to tell the Transports two things: that the machine is broken and currently unable to sent anyone back in time, and that the island has been overrun with aggressive, mutated beasts sent by the United Earth. They have been under siege for months, with the island's population reduced to a mere fraction of what it had once been.

Comments

THE TRANSPORTER ROOM

[initiatesnpc]

The damage to the machine is visible. The side panels are dented, and error messages are constantly displaying. Though the machine is unable to send anyone back in time, it is fully capable of bringing new Transports into Exsilium, and is doing so regularly. In order to set things right on the island, the machine must be repaired.

The Initiative has lost many of the personnel who were responsible for maintaining the equipment, so they now call upon the scientific minds among the Transports to aid in this task.

[trustycrowbar]

Gordon grunts as he half-crawls into the housing of the teleporter via a hatch on the side, sleeves rolled up and labcoat tossed to the side. It was a natural thing for him to stay behind in the labs and work on the thing, but he didn't expect tech-spelunking to be a part of it.

"Looks liek the parametric localization chipset is loose. Hey, hand me the soldering gun, will ya?"

He reaches back out through the hatch, waving, head still lost in the darkness. Anyone there?

[getwrenched]

Winry finds the soldering gun in question, handing it over to a man she's not properly met. "Do you have enough light on the situation?"

For a young woman wearing protective gloves she's borrowed and an apron over a dress of all things, she seems remarkably at home in this situations. The machinery is different, and she's not a mechanic in general, but having an idea of how a system worked -- and being able to pick out and hand over the tools being asked for -- left her on firmer footing than she had been sitting in her apartment and wondering how many of the patients she'd seen still were alive.

[trustycrowbar]

He's not going to complain about the quality of her help, but he does wish she'd put some pants on. Wearing a dress in a lab is like asking to have your legs lasered off.

"Thanks, and yyyyyeah... no. How about a flashlight too?"

[getwrenched]

Bare legs, but hair firmly back and out of the way. Everyone had different priorities!

"One minute, I think I saw one over there."

Winry shifts and ducks down to look through a box filled with socket wrenches and a pick ax, grabbing the cylindrical handle she'd spotted earlier. She checked that the batteries worked, aiming the stream of light under the desk to check for brightness. It'd do. She'd prefer to find a smaller one, but for now...

"Here's this one. Do you want someone holding your light steady?"

[trustycrowbar]

He wriggles back out long enough to get a good look at his assistant. "Uh... sure." He was honestly expecting the soldiering gun to be thrown at him by some unseen, overworked and barely-compliant lab member. He's not used to getting this much help, and it shows.

"I don't think I caught your name before." The lanky man adds, turning to reach back into the sea of wires and graphite circuits.

[getwrenched]

Help shouldn't be that surprising. Winry raises her eyebrows when they're looking at each other, curious and focused on whatever task might be on hand. "I didn't get the chance to introduce myself. Winry Rockbell," she offered, peering into the mess Gordan was trying to put to rights. "Automail mechanic." To date those words hadn't meant anything paired together to anyone here, but a month wasn't all that much time, and mechanic seemed close to universal for "tool handy."

"What's your name, sir?" She moves until the flashlight's in a good situation, not cut off by his head or shoulders. No point in bringing light in if it wasn't shining where you needed to see.

[fe_male]

"Everything's loose. Do you even know who's in the room right now? Can you see?"

But hey, here, have fun. He's working on something on the other side, glancing between what's in front of him and a displayed scan he had JARVIS run beside him.

[trustycrowbar]

BANG, head against top of hatch. "Aow, nngh, g'dmmit... thanks." He recoils from the portal of doom and collects the tool, still rubbing the back of his head and craning his neck to see what Tony's up to."

"How're things working out over there? Wait, that's uh... JARVIS, right? What exactly is he, anyway? Just an OS, or is it self-identifying?"

[fe_male]

"No problem."

Apologetic. Who's apologetic. What's that.

"Please, you insult him down to his distinctive British accent. JARVIS is an AI. Self-identifying, an autodidact, brilliant, perfect - only slightly stilted because of, well, everything here. But he's adapting well, aren't you dear?"

[trustycrowbar]

He smirks as he rummages through the recycled parts bin for a control crystal manifold. "...Should I leave you two lovebirds alone?"

[strategic_guile]

This was one of the only places where Blaine felt simultaneously at home and out of place. He had been in many labs as a child and teen, but there was a lack of a tall blonde woman with a tight bun atop her head. Was it really strange for this place to remind him of his family? Probably not, but he didn't like the feel of nostalgia at all. He was preparing to leave when he heard a voice. There wasn't anyone else around at the time, so he went over, finding the soldering gun and handing it to the waving hand.

[trustycrowbar]

"Thanks. now commiere, you little..." Reverberates back, and with a short round of fidgeting and sparks in the dark the lanky man finally draws himself back out. Oh look who it is! When he turns back and recognizes Blaine he bumps back against the teleporter housing with a "GNNGH!" of surprise.

"Blaine? What're you doing here?"

[strategic_guile]

Blaine smiles a bit, amused by the tussling he can hear going on inside the machine. Man vs Machine. Upon Gordon's release from the depths and the totally unnecessary surprise, he lifted both of his eyebrows slightly as if to call into question the extreme reaction to seeing his face. "I was curious," he answered back. More or less the truth.

[trustycrowbar]

You make him nervous, Blaine. There's little more to it than that. He relaxes almost immediately, frowning at his own reaction. He squints at a holoreadout nearby to cover it up.

"You surprised me. Didn't think I'd see you down here at all."

[fe_male]

He's in the labs for at least the first few days. Balancing out between bashing shit in and hammering it back out, you know you know. Plus, it's nice doing some problem solving again, and it isn't like there's particularly a plethora of people clamouring around trying to fix the thing.

At the moment, he's focusing a little more on the lines and lines of error codes scrolling by the screen. Good chance to learn a bit more about Initiative technology, and he's already infiltrated them once to some degree - knowledge that at the moment is coming in decently handily enough.

"Pretty handy, breaking the thing in only one direction."

[getwrenched]

"Isn't that part of why we're not allowed to say no to the whole recruitment drive?" Winry can stare at that code all day long, waiting for any of it to make sense. The longer she's been here, the more things seem to fit together, but it's a far cry from understanding the whys.

"Only applied to this world's time... stream," she settled on, "As well as our own."

[fe_male]

"I think a decent part of that was a sort of an 'if they can't say no, they might mean yes' mentality. It doesn't really hold up in court."

The code isn't really making a whole lot of sense a decent part of the time, but it's working well enough. At least, it's making sense often enough to motivate him on to keep working on it, rather than attempting to just sort of break the thing more out of irritation.

"If it's only bringing people here, I count it as one direction. Relativity strands you in shades of grey. Ruins the 3D."

[getwrenched]

Court keeps coming up as much more relevant to people around here than it ever has been for her previously. Winry makes a noncommittal noise, turning her gaze back to the code that keeps on babbling on. Code that has everything to do with the sorts of puzzles that Ed would probably better at, if he had some desire to decode what it all meant.

"Three dee?" Why did half of what people say make no sense? "That this thing works two way at any point makes about as much sense as time travel working at all. Is there anything I can help you with?"

[fe_male]

Unfortunately, Tony is not frequently inclined to explain himself unless asked to do so directly. And... oftentimes not even then. If he started stopping to explain himself all the time, he'd never get anything done, because that's what he would be doing. All the time.

That earns you a glance, because, yes, 3D, what even, and also the thing working is time travel. "Time usually does go in only the one direction." It's a short glance though, because he's got a handful of screens here to work with and at any given point at least one of them is showing something moderately useful. "Mechanic?"

[feel_nevermore]

Raven stands a few feet behind Tony watching him work in silence. She's come to the labs for pretty much the same reason. Because she thought this would be at least a good opportunity to get a closer look at that time travel technology the Initiative stole from the government of United Earth. Unfortunaly she's not as good as Cyborg with computers and such. Not by far. That man here, however, seems to know what he's doing.

"Think you could fix it?"

[fe_male]

"To the extent it was already broken."

You're super lucky - Tony can multi-task, sort of, meaning that he can keep working and also glance you over enough to determine that you seem to have wandered out of a play. Or something.

"You looking to help or just looking?"

[feel_nevermore]

Of course, Raven notices the way he glances at her. Her looks often earns her this kind of nonplussed reaction. And she's learnt not to react to that. She shrugs.

"Well I suppose I can help. If you tell me what to do."

[fe_male]

If it helps, he gives people lots of looks. They get individual looks, and he doesn't assume all of them came out of a modern adaptation of a Shakespearean play, just the special people.

"How much do you know about - " vague hand gesture at... everything. "'Overcoming the Fourier problem right here' or closer to 'this wire looks blue'?"

open

[motherofnemesis]

[ So fixing this is a whole thing. She ducks around people and finds herself in the room, circling the equipment. It's not like anything she's worked with before, but her intuition's pretty good. She could probably lend a hand in at least some respect, and at the least starting to make connections and gain trust is a good idea. ]

Where do you guys need an extra pair of hands?