1st video/action

[17thangel]

Video;

A smallish pale girl appears on the system, moving around somewhat frantically near the various cabins with a look that is 1 part confusion, 1 part anxiety, and 4 parts annoyance and 4 parts whatever that look Mr. Scott had when Captain Kirk told him to rewrite the laws of physics in 15 minutes.

"Um, look. I'm sure whatever is going on is really important here but I was kind of in the middle of something back home. Something involving restoring a destroyed planetary power system before life support on something completely fails and given how I only sort of LOOKED at it for about a minute and most of the best parts are under the sea I really don't have a lot of time for this right now. After I get it up sure, bring me and MY SEIBZEHN here and we'll step on ANYTHING you want but you just brought me and I'm not so useful for squishing things alone."

"I understand you want to make it personal by saying my dad is one of the people here but I do kind of know my family, even if we were separated most of my life. Really, just let me finish my project and just ask, home will probably be unbearably dull once I get the Zohar reactor working again anyways so it'll be a welcome diversion."

Her face turns a bit more irritated at the next part.

"Unless this is some sort of gag Mr. One Eyed Pirate King! I know you're the one who bonked me over the head and drug me out before I could get a better look at that system to get it back online despite the city crashing. Don't think for one minute that if this is some sort of gag and I find you behind it I won't BEAT THE EVER-LOVING SNOT OUT OF YOUR ONE REMAINING GOOD EYE!"

Action;

Later Maria is sitting by the water looking miserable. She's playing with her watch, pushing every damn button on the thing.

"Yeah yeah... No carrier. Seibzehn, I know you have to have power. Please come in. Dad had to have put in his own reactor or something. C'mon, you can't do this to me! You always come. Maybe some sort of jamming I need to figure out how to defeat. Oh who are you kidding Balthasar, the power grid is down and you're some place weird."

She buries her head in her knees and keeps pressing the button getting lower with every non-receptive beep she gets.

Comments

[17thangel]

"Seibzehn is my gear. Um... Right... Lambs. Big robot thing I ride on and fight with. As for electronics not working, why the hell did they bring me then?"

[vedaandme]

Big robot thing...?

"You mean like a mobile suit?" He wasn't sure if she'd heard the term. If she was like him, then she might not, in the same way he hadn't recognized the term 'gear'. He would explain further based on her reaction.

"As for bringing you here, there must be something. From what I can gather, we have been given other abilities based on who our supposed parent is." He didn't look like he believed it. "It is highly likely that you have been brought here for that reason, not what you did back where you are from."

[17thangel]

"I haven't heard that term but most of them the pilot is inside. I guess if they're afraid of the wind in their hair."

She looks around and pushes another button on her watch, the antennae on it shrinking into it.

"Thing about it is... I know who my dad is. He gave his life for me and no matter how much some bozo tells me that hammer guy is I'm not going to believe them. That and if they HAD a decent design bay sure I'd build gears for you all if I had the time, but they don't. Its just a bunch of forges and do I look like I have the arms for that?"

[vedaandme]

That sounded like a mobile suit to him. Close enough for now.

"I have not yet figured out a purpose for my presence, either," he stated. He wasn't going to get into the whole parents thing just yet. Innovades were created in pods, not born like normal human children, so he didn't really have parents, just genetic donors. The idea of anyone being his actual biological parent was pretty farfetched for him.

"But I would not be so certain that you were brought here to build something similar to your gear."

He was pretty sure there were a lot of other people feeling pretty awkward and displaced by their new abilities and what expectations were being put on them.

[17thangel]

She shook her head, this wasn't a war, this wasn't a flying city, this wasn't her gig.

"If they don't have something for me to pilot or maintain then they really brought the wrong girl. That's pretty much all I can do."

[vedaandme]

Trying another tactic... though he wasn't quite sure why. Maybe because she was young and reminded him a little of Mileina.

"That is what I was trained for as well. I am not certain what I can provide to them without a mobile suit here, but I am determined to find out."

He looked out over the water.

"I refuse to believe that it was chance. There is a reason. I will find it, I will do what is needed, and I will return home."

Because that's really where he should be. Home. With his teammates. Not in some pseudo summer camp fighting imaginary monsters.

[17thangel]

"I don't know. Maybe this is punishment for Solaris, or Deus, or simply being too stubborn to just accept what we did and move on. Still, some tacky youth retreat place."

She shakes her head.

"I just need to find some way to get the wind in my hair again. I've always hated being grounded."

[vedaandme]

"You seem to like wind."

It was a dry statement, hard to tell if Tieria was joking or not. He frowned.

"I am not certain what is involved, truly, but I am most definitely beginning to realize that it is not something in our own worlds that is controlling it." So no punishments, no special assignments, no enemies, no captures, no weird hallucinatory drugs. They were pulled, not pushed, and finding a way to escape that pull was Tieria's current goal.

[17thangel]

"So the first duty of any prisoner is escape. Got it."

She nods and looks at him.

"And yeah, I grew up on a flying city, got so I could tell you how fast we were going just by the vibrations of the ground and the wind."

[vedaandme]

"A flying city?" That sounded interesting. "Is that like a space station?"

[17thangel]

"No, only a mile or so off surface. Orbit had too much debris in it for exploration. I think the last war 500 years ago still had it all cluttered."

[vedaandme]

That was actually really fascinating to him. He focused on her now.

"How big was it? What did you use to keep it in the air and to power it?"

All the questions!

[17thangel]

"Shevaat was the central district of old Sheevat when it was a ground city. I guess about 15,000 people lived there full time and another few thousand came and went as they needed to for work."

She ponders a bit.

"I know there were 4 antigravity generators that kept it in the air when it was flying, and they were powered like pretty much everything else. Off the system that Deus ran."

[vedaandme]

"Deus is a person, then?" He nodded a little. "That sounds like quite a large operation to keep airborne. Did you ever have to land?"

[17thangel]

"Deus was what Solaris called god. An ancient computer system on the ship that we suspect brought human life to our world. It also was crazy which is why we had to put it down."

[vedaandme]

A god computer. Tieria hesitated at that. For a long time, he had sort of felt the equivalent for VEDA.

"A computer that is a god." He let that sink in. "Somehow, I do not think a computer could truly achieve that status." After all, even he learned that VEDA had its faults and its decisions were at the mercy of what information it had been given. If that information was bad, then VEDA could easily provide a bad decision. It couldn't branch outside of logical thinking. It didn't have humanity.

[17thangel]

"I only got the briefest looks at it, but Doc said that it was originally the computer of something called a colony ship but it looked like it achieved sentience and crashed into our planet. I know it controlled a lot of nanomachines that could alter how life developed."

She shakes her head a bit.

"I have a schematic someone else took and a base understanding of the theory. It kind of started turning people into monsters before we could have a proper discussion with it."

[vedaandme]

That was disturbing. The one thing there, though, was that their system had gained sentience, while VEDA had not. Tieria momentarily wondered if it could, but he supposed not as long as an Innovade was maintaining it as a computer and not a god.

"Interesting," he said. "It was using the nanomachines to create those monsters, I presume?"

He knew that nanomachinery could do a lot, but could it really alter a person that much while they were alive?

[17thangel]

"not exactly. It was using them to alter existing genetic material I think. Solaris did things to it all so I can't say for certain. Really they're the ones who drove it completely nuts."

She sighs and shakes her head.

[vedaandme]

"Solaris... an organization of some sort?"

Like Celestial Being?

[17thangel]

"Was one of the four countries. They wanted... To become gods."

[vedaandme]

"Mm."

Tieria frowned at that. People with too much power could easily be corrupted. He had seen it several times.

"Were you able to stop them?"

[17thangel]

"Well, yes and no."

[vedaandme]

Which was it? Yes? Or no? Tieria sort of just line-faced at her. Really?

"And?"

[17thangel]

"City burned, most of its inhabitants that were into that sort of thing died. One of them, the leader, he vanished with Deus after we beat the hell out of it. So did Fei, one of ours though. Don't remember much after that, someone knocked me over the head so I wouldn't stay behind with the gears."