trans_9 | Nighthawks at the Diner [Open]

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Nighthawks at the Diner [Open]

Batman was restless. Too tired, too bored to sleep. It wasn't as if there was much concept left of day and night on Stacy but if anyone could find it and abuse it, it was the Batman. With a mechanical proclivity that came with repeating the same motions every night of what on this particular night felt like a very, very long life, he donned his uniform. Like always, he paused for a few brief moments, holding the cowl between his fingers and feeling the weight of it before pulling it over his head. Lit by the battery of computer consoles that ran across the deck of the Neuropathy bay, he strode out to the school of cars that could take him up into the lofty ceiling of the enormous chamber and the sprawling spaghetti junction of neural pathways.

The crackle of a power torch. The flare of brilliant, blue incandescence. The same old scene for hours, days, weeks, months. Batman was doing the same thing he did every night, Pinky. Keeping this half-scuttled rat trap from doing something inconvenient, like killing them all. And as if anyone needed informing, he preferred it if he could do so without being disturbed.

Bats in the belfry. So it goes.

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Batman, of course, wasn't the only night owl in this part of the ship. Angie had been working most of the day to get a few interfaces up, with only limited success. She'd settled on one of the pathways high up, looking over a holographic representation of Neuropathy, turning it so that she could get a better idea of where she might be able to work next.

Then she heard someone else down below her.

Curious, Angie lifted off and dropped downward carefully until she was on the same level with the other person. "I thought I was the only one still functioning at this time."

"Rrn," one would say functionality was in the eye of the beholder, but that grunt was how he was all the time.

He frowned as recognition came from the metahuman records. Spica. Technopath. M.O. that he thoroughly disapproved of. One that she was demonstrating as they spoke. He suspected the Major had something to do with it. It would explain how the Engineer got past her, assuming she was there at all. For an interdimensional ark, Stacy's security was somewhat lacking.

Staring at her blankly through black bat-goggles, he replied, "This is a restricted section, you know."

The MO tended to be Apollo and Midnighter's far more than hers. Angie was a scientist first and foremost. Though she'd certainly helped on occasion.

"Is it?" Angie blinked, then grimaced. "Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Sorry. I didn't even think about it. I'm pretty used to doing what needs done on our shift ship. I should have expected things to be different here."

He gave another grunt as he turned back to the section he was working on. She had just hit on one of the meatship's universal truths and why any sense of structure was a vain pursuit: Everyone was used to doing as they liked.

Having cut through the panel he rips it free, exposing a mass of burnt out wiring and circuitry. Yet another sabotaged subsystem. Third grunt of the evening. He was really beginning to dislike Stacy's former crew.

"Shift ship?"

She leaned forward, grimacing. "Was it the original crew that did that or something later?" Not scanning wasn't happening. The damage was pretty extensive, after all.

"And yes, shift-ship. That's what we know them as where I'm from. A ship that can shift between worlds using the Bleed." She made an encompassing gesture. "The Carrier is similar, though it's entirely mechanical. And I've no idea if Stacy has access to Dooring technology or not."

"This hub? Previous crew. Internal short-out, the exterior otherwise untouched. None of the damage resulting from the pirates or subsequent attacks is nearly this precise."

A hand delved into the port and returned with a fistful of charred wire. The scuttled parts generally required gutting and rebuilding from scratch, but at least it was tidy.

"You're familiar with Bleed travel?" colour his curiosity piqued. It was rare that anyone came to Stacy with prior knowledge of the Bleed. She was the first that didn't originate from his universe.

"May I see it?" she asked, frowning. "And possibly an example of an undamaged hub?" If she knew what it needed to look like and what it was originally made of, there might be something she could do.

The second question got a smile. "Yep. We've done a fair bit of it ourselves. And in a lot of ways, it's easier to live in the Bleed and Door back to Earth than it is to keep the Carrier in orbit over Earth."

Motoko hadn't felt weariness in her perception of 'bones' for many years. She could be bored, which was much the same, and she could sleep, but something told her that that sensation of darkness and pleasingly random soft-fired stimulation that her cyberbrain used as a stand-in for dreaming had as much to do with actual sleep as it did defrag. Defrag was what she was doing right now, though she could as easily have been sleeping. It was a period of quiet nothingness, streaks of sensory-deprecation as sectors finished and flipped over clean.

Defrag was a lot like death as well.

The native systems in her shell made noise at her when Bruce's presence sprung the motion-sensors, and the defragmentation program paused in its work, then subsided unfinished. Ultimately this would make its eventual completion all the more complex, but that was the price of living; all tasks must go unfinished in the face of survival. Her HUD came up live as the flare finished its initial blaze and the glare compensator went into action automatically.

She hadn't come down from here in days, and even now made no motion, still as a statue except for that now her eyes were open. The Major watched. She was always watching, evaluating, and after a moment, finding Bruce's work meticulous as ever, flicked her gaze smoothly to his face instead. At this distance she was using some zoom, but not a lot, and the blink caught her by surprise when it obscured her vision momentarily. The hell? When had that worthless little tendency started up again? She killed the subroutine like an annoyed hand shooing a fly. Go away, humanity, you're not wanted here.

"You should be asleep."

Bruce huffed slightly with the realisation that he probably wouldn't be getting any work done this evening. So this was where she had been hiding...

"There are a great many things I should be doing," he replied, the light from the power torch flickering in his goggles, "Sleeping isn't one of them."

"Aside from this?"

If he didn't want to take care of his fragile little body, that was none of her concern. When he ran himself into the ground, she'd owe him the courtesy of at least shoving him into somewhere he wouldn't be electrocuted or stepped on, but that was about it.

"I'm changing the priority list," she replied, even though a more accurate way of saying it would be that she already had, "It's shorter, if that's any consolation."

Ev en a few drops out of the ocean counted as 'less,' technically.

He could real off a list of everything he had been accustomed to doing, both little and small. Meetings with the shareholders. Opening the latest hospice, school, youth centre or shelter in Gotham's grand urban renewal scheme. Dusting for prints. Routine maintenance on the Batmobile. Pulling bullets from his own flesh. Extracting information by electrocution via toilet bowl and stray power cables. Conan Doyle by the fire. Discussing Tim's education at parent-teacher night.

They would mean little to her. They didn't mean much to anyone anymore.

"By all means, pretend you haven't done so already."

Ten minutes with a Tachikoma and always-on internet piped directly into your brain so that your employers could check that you weren't having fantasies of killing them all in their sleep? Different worlds, same sphere, was the level of complexity comparable? Lets not pretend a soldier isn't used to pulling bullets from bodies.

At any rate, parent-teacher night had never been in her list of tortures. Leave that to Togusa and his happy little nuclear family.

"What man will do any good who is without conceit?" She quoted cheekily, and moved past him. Bruce was entertaining when tired, in a way that insinuated he felt old— it half-reminded her of Ishikawa.

He rumbled like a low-level tremor and pretended he was still able to concentrate with her hovering, "To what do we owe the good mood?"

"You don't already know?"

Her face was as impassive as ever, if he'd looked, or if she'd been turned his direction, but a cruel smile twisted somewhere in her tone, like the curl of milk through black coffee. The low background hum of Legion's network traffic wasn't annoying yet. Far from it, it was comforting.

This was becoming something of a nightly ritual, one temporarily disturbed due to new relations with his roommate, but one he still carried out nevertheless. Usually Dustin restricted himself to Engineering—as of recent, however, he’d been discovered, and though that encounter did deter him for a time, the generally good reaction he received from said encounter only seemed to harden his nerves, give him more boldness and guile in navigating about these restricted areas. Even the Major, who also frequented Neuropathy on an all-too-regular basis, was becoming less of a threat (or even an annoyance) and more of a test, a game, to see how effectively Dustin could slip past in a variety of ways.

Either that or she was humoring him. Dustin preferred to think the former.

Tonight he was even more rash than usual, deciding that he would go so far as to poke around the inner core of Neuropathy. This was due in no small part to having seen a shadowy figure go up ahead of time; Dustin probably wouldn’t have noticed had he not been already paranoid and jumpy upon entering, as he always was, though now that he had noticed there was no going back. What if this creature was sabotaging Stacy’s essential functions? If so, how long had they been doing this? Where they the reason for Stacy’s malfunctioning circuits in the first place?

From his position below, Dustin saw the masked figure for the first time, faintly illuminated by the pinprick light of a blowtorch far above him. It was difficult to tell exactly what he was doing all the way up there, and the only means of transport to a better vantage point was with the line of cars that would definitely give away his presence should he use them. Instead he settled with observing quietly from below, keeping a close eye on the fellow should he do something suspicious—or ingenious, in which case Dustin would mutter a few foreign phrases under his breath and mentally work out equations on his palm.

Some bits of Russian might have been more emphatic than others.

Though at that distance and with the noise from the equipment it would otherwise be difficult to pick out the odd exclamation, Batman has the benefits of the sonic technology in his cowl.

He'd never encountered the dishevelled prodigy himself, but the reputation preceeded. He rose to his feet deceptively slowly - beady eyes fixed on the scruffy tearaway below - but in the time it would take Dustin to blink, Batman disappeared.

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Nighthawks at the Diner [Open]

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