The Battle That Ended The Century

[cityship]

People say that war is hell. This looked it.

Buildings and cars and bodies are scattered like broken toys as far as the eye can see, stretching out toward a dirty horizon. Even the clouds seems streaked with mud and blood, and they're taking it out on everyone below with a constant stream of cold, soaking rain.

The sounds of fighting seem to come from all directions, but at this moment, there's no one else in sight.

A breather. The calm before the storm.

[[OOC: This is for everyone who was involved with "The Lurking Fear". Questions go to Milo or Kaylin.]]

Comments

[quark-assassin.livejournal.com]

No worries—it’s not like he usually receives anything better.

Dustin sighed heavily, staring at the tattered remains of his coat, before gingerly folding it up and placing it within his soaked backpack. He looked oddly naked without the garment, as he was wearing only a black and red t-shirt underneath, far too baggy for one with such a frail frame, and with his bushy brown hair substantially wet he gave a striking semblance to a drowned cat. Albeit, a drowned cat with an exposed forearm prosthetic twitching awkwardly by its junction, exposed, scarred, and still red from the uncountable procedures Dustin performed in order to attach it. The way the metal twisted, curving around insulation and bicep insertions, was, nevertheless, almost like a work of art.

And then he glanced back at the collapsed Yoshimi, gaze softening as he noticed her pain. Yes: despite popular belief, the man does indeed have a heart.

Not like he was about to show it, though. Dustin immediately bristled. “What, don’t you have any bright ideas?”

”…Because I don’t have any…”

[slainrobots.livejournal.com]

Yoshimi's fascination with the scrawny man's arm tries to surface, but her exhaustion is too deep for such involved conjecturing, and she's too limp to move right now. She decides, instead, to glare half-heartedly at him.

"No, jackass. I'm not the one with the superhuman brain here. Though I can't say that you're using the damn thing too well right now." A careful inhale follows on the tail end of her words, and the tone that would ordinarily have been cutting and scornful is barely sarcastic with her in her current state. "What's up with that, anyway?"

[quark-assassin.livejournal.com]

Dustin arched his shoulders, scowling threateningly, ready to snap back at the pink-haired one with the most vile and nasty comment he could come up with—only to realize that Yoshimi was right. What was wrong with him?

He seemed to deflate, taking several deep breaths to calm down, narrowed eyes sliding to the opposite wall with ashamed reluctance. He shuffled there and sank to the ground.

“…I don’t know…”

There’s always a first for everything, right?

[slainrobots.livejournal.com]

And just as Dustin had prepared to snap back at her, Yoshimi fully expects such a response, only to be blindsided by his equivalent confusion and... well, I guess he is capable of human emotion... Of course, she knows that she's joking - he's very capable of human emotion. Just... not very obviously.

"Well, uh... what do you... feel?" There is concern in her voice despite its weakness, and she would move over to his side of the hut but for her own exhaustion. "I mean, you're you, that brain of yours is, like... I don't know. It's half of you. I'd assume that you could feel something weird if it was going on up there."

[quark-assassin.livejournal.com]

He gave a weak, sardonic chuckle, scowling at the dusty floor by his feet. Part of him wanted to make a crack at Yoshimi for attempting to help him, but frankly Dustin was more concerned to have her company than her advice.

“Yeah, I do…” he muttered, kneading his temple experimentally, “It’s like…this noise, this constant static ringing in my ears, like…like my brain’s working, but I’m not getting a signal.”

Dustin was rambling—this was bad. “You know what I mean, right?”

[slainrobots.livejournal.com]

She cringes as the memory of overwhelming white noise echoes in her ears. Yes, she knows exactly what he means.

"Is it... well, I mean... it sounds like this... this one time, I had to kind of... take down the Internet, and when I knocked out the final server, my VerID chip went... crazy. It was just white noise, and it wasn't that it wasn't letting me think, it was that I couldn't. Something about that noise breaks all capabilities of cogent thought...." Which had been bad at the time, as the facility housing the engine was going into shutdown, which really means explosion when it's an international military station that has been breached, and she hadn't been able to think clearly enough to get the hell out of there. She had some shiny, shiny scars from that one.

She would conjecture more, something about residual energy from the beginning of the Universe and white noise - because it's a commonly taught fact in the schools of her time that a very small percentage of white noise is radiation from the Big Bang, which proves helpful knowledge for programming some of the communication devices used in war... She would conjecture, but she's already looking pale from the memory of home, and her breath short from blood loss.

She settles, instead, for a query: "Anything like that?"