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Jamie was tired.

The exhaustion was, almost, a welcome respite from the mind-numbing fear of SHODAN's attack on the crew, the panic barely held at bay in the cockpit of the Geno Saurer, fighting off hordes of smaller robots and, eventually, mobs of Zoids whose command systems had been overtaken by the malevolent AI. The feeling of helpless terror, of facing his own impending death had become so commonplace since the Daligig had so generously chosen him to help fight their war for them that Jamie was, when he bothered to think about it, surprised - and frustrated, and annoyed with himself - that he hadn't gotten a better handle on it. But it was the same every time, in every single battle, and this instance, as ceaseless waves of metal bodies in every shape imaginable had rushed him and his Zoid, had been no exception.

And then everything had just...stopped. The swarms of mechanized enemies had ceased their onslaught, everything had gone eerily quiet, and there was finally time to regroup, tend to injuries, figure out what the hell had happened. Time to rest.

For most people, probably. Jamie hadn't. There was work to be done, repairs to be made, damages to patch up. None of it was going to fix itself and Jamie wouldn't have tolerated any opportunity to let himself think about the newest horror the ship, or the multiverse in general, had inflicted on them. He'd welcomed the overabundance of work.

He'd gone wherever he was sent initially, and once orders had stopped being handed down, as the preliminary rush of activity had faded and things slowly resumed some semblance of normalcy, he'd gone where he thought he could be of the most use. And as time wore on and his energy reserves became stretched thin, he more often than not found himself wandering to the hangar.

The Geno Saurer lurked in an isolated corner, miraculously still upright but slumping with palpable exhaustion. Surrounding the blue tyrannosaur were the battered carcasses of several Rev Raptors, scattered in ungainly sprawls of clawed limbs and serrated tails and serpentine necks. Jamie picked his way through them, paranoia pricking alarm at dulled senses - what if the things came back to life and attacked again? SHODAN had been defeated, the threat eliminated, or so everyone believed. Believing in things didn't make them true, though. Belief, Jamie was finding, didn't mean much around here.

He reached the Geno, pausing near one hind claw, wavering slightly as he craned his neck to gaze up at her. The Zoid's wedge-shaped head was angled toward the ground, optics dimly lit with the barest hint of cognizance. The brush of her awareness of him was reassuring, something he found himself clinging to for comfort. She was tired too, Jamie could tell. She'd fought hard and needed to be taken care of as much as anyone else.

"'m sorry," he murmured, resting a hand on the edge of one claw. "I should've been here sooner, huh. Everything's just been busy. You understand that, right?"

Of course she did. He could tell. Somehow.

"...yeah." He'd let himself slump forward, leaning heavily against her talon, head drooping and hand still pressed to metal. "'m here now. I promised I'd take care of you, back on the island. I didn't forget."

He wasn't entirely sure how long he'd remained like that when some noise nearby - faint or loud, it was all the same to his rattled senses - snapped him from inaction and he jerked to attention, twisting to face the source of the noise, looking more than a little wild-eyed.

[[This can be bendytimed to any point post-SHODAN, including before/during/after Shore Leave.]]

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"We don't ride this one anywhere," Jamie said firmly, "not yet." Assuming he was interpreting Punchy's lingo properly. It was hard to tell sometimes.

Scrunching against the opposite side of the cockpit to make room for the other teen, Jamie punched a few buttons on the Raptor's center console, hooked his omnicomm into it, and waited for the diagnostic program to bring up its results.

"Okay," he said, showing Punchy his comm, which now featured a green-outlined schematic of the Zoid's anatomy, red text indicating trouble spots. "We don't care about the combat systems right now, so ignore those. We just wanna get them up and moving under their own power. Some of 'em might just need their command systems rebooted, others are gonna need some minor repair work done. A couple of 'em the Geno had to get a little rougher, so they need more extensive repairs." Like the one not too far away whose left hind leg had been forcibly removed from its body, for example.

"Your comm will probably translate the readouts to...whatever language you speak." For once this was not, despite what Punchy was no doubt used to, a dig at the way he talked; Jamie legitimately had no idea where the guy was from or what his language might be and was too frazzled right now to be bothered with tact. "Any questions?"

Punchy's generally not one to admit when he's beat, but he's also not stupid enough to think that he's going to be good at mechanics just because he's good with code. He looks at his omnicomm, checking over the red spots and hovering his finger on them.

"I'm down with the systems reboots. That's a pinch for me, you dig?" He rolls his eyes a little at Jamie's perceived jab at his speech. If he cut ties with everyone who made fun of his dialect he'd be the loneliest person in the entire world, and probably even more antisocial than Jamie himself.

"Anyway, you good for the physical side of this shizz? I can help you carry stuff but I'm way bomber at the programming side of shit."

"Yeah, I can take care of the mechanical stuff. Just yell if you have any questions about anything. If you wanna move on to another one after you get this one rebooted, go ahead." Jamie disconnected his omnicomm and climbed over the lip of the cockpit, bracing against the side of the Raptor's face in a practiced manner as he fixed Punchy with one of those expressions that was trying so hard to impart dead seriousness that it was nearly comical.

"Once we get 'em all back online, we'll work on putting them back into storage. Just don't. Touch the weapons systems. 'Cause if you do, and if you do any more damage in here, General Chacon is going to strangle you to death with your own intestines, and then she's going to come after me for letting you in the cockpit in the first place. Got it?"

"A'ight."

Punchy gives Jamie a look like he wants to smack Jamie upside the head. "I'm not some dunce, homes. I ain't gonna rig any caps or nothing while I'm in here. Don't act like I'm stupid."

It's not a completely invalid assumption, and he does have occasional phenomenal lapses in common sense, but he's just about had it to here with people on the ship assuming he's a total idiot.

Jamie recognized that look and recoiled ever so slightly, not entirely sure the other teen wasn't going to follow through on what his expression suggested. "'m just making sure we're on the same page," he returned mildly. "I never said you were stupid." It was just that being ~~a control freak~~ responsible and keeping everyone else on track like he'd done back home was a hard habit to break, no matter how long he'd been away.

"You were thinking it." Punchy shakes his head and pounds some numbers into his omnicomm. It is kind of impressive, how intuitive code is to him. He doesn't seem to have a learning curve at all on using the diagnostics. He starts rebooting this vehicle's systems.

Granted, it's only impressive because he's mostly been quiet while doing so, as opposed to running his rather idiosyncratic mouth more at Jamie. At first he thought it was just that Jamie is obviously tired, but by now he's started to realize that he and Jamie have very different work-styles.

Not that that'll stop him any from being a #1 Friend. "You wanna chow some later, once we get these bitches revved?"

Jamie'd intended to observe Punchy for a minute to see he had a handle on things and then leave to get to work on one of the other downed Raptors, but the speed with which the other teen worked caught his attention, and he found himself watching for far longer than he'd originally planned. Punchy's voice snapped him out of it.

"Mn, food can wait. There's plenty of other stuff I need to get to once the Raptors are back up." His eyes flicked approvingly over Punchy's omnicomm and the Rev Raptor's consoles. "You're good at this."

"Been bustin' my chops on Programming shit here, that Brainiac shiznat. Just practice." He finishes the reboot and hops out. "But...thanks. I kinda got mad skills for it up in my brain. Code and all."

Punchy raises his eyebrows. He can't raise either independently, but the thought is there! "Dawg, if you don't eat something your work's gonna be sloppy. Duh. Hold on, I got pizza rolls."

Jamie spent a moment more after Punchy'd vacated the cockpit to take a look at the consoles and verify that the command system was indeed up and running before scaling down the Raptor's face to the floor of the hangar, circling around the Zoid's head to see about tending to the damages on its other side. He resisted the urge to glare at Punchy as he went; he didn't need to be lectured, dammit. (Besides, usually he was the one doing the lecturing.)

"I've got stuff to hold me over if I get too famished," he said dryly. "Someone in Hydroponics made a bunch of dried fruit for us for situations like this. I'll be fine."

...aside from which, Jamie had no idea if Punchy was indicating that he had the pizza rolls on his person, right now, this very second, which begged the question of just where he was keeping them. And how long they'd been there.

"Dried fruit isn't food." Punchy doesn't state this like a joke; he states it like a belief, or a fact. As if the idea of eating dried fruit is just silly.

Don't worry, Jamie, Punchy brought a lunch box! And it was not kept down his pants. This is a welcome improvement from the few times he's shown up to work at Programming with candybars in his underwear, although in his defense they were still in the original wrappers.

Granted, the pizza rolls are frozen still, but it's the offer that counts, right? Punchy is genuinely trying to be friendly. He's getting the feeling Jamie's a little...lonely.

"It's edible and full of nutrients. And tastes better than the slop. Not that that's saying much, because the slop is...well, it's slop, the name says it all, pretty much." Jamie checked his rambling and gave his head a little shake, half-glaring at Punchy as though he were entirely to blame for bringing the topic up in the first place, but mostly he had the look of someone who's resigned themselves to sleepless nights and hard work for the foreseeable future. "Look, thanks for the offer, but like I said, there's a ton to do down here. You don't have to stick around when we're finished with the Revs if you don't wanna, but I need to get some of this stuff done."

Pssh, lonely. Jamie had his Zoid and that was all the company a man needed! Though he definitely would have appreciated the knowledge that whatever food Punchy happened to have on him wasn't being stored in his pants.

"Look, dawg, I'mma bring you a pizza roll whether you want it or not. Just because you told me not too." You have declined Punchy's friendship, Jamie! That makes him both huffy and secretly worried that you're suicidal. He'll have to do something about that.

Punchy disappears for a few minutes and does, indeed, return with a frozen pizza roll for Jamie.

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v. sorry for the late tag.

no problem! Life happens!

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