[open]

[riseupnchargem.livejournal.com]

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.]]

Comments

[riseupnchargem.livejournal.com]

Jamie shrugged. "Depends what you mean by 'complex'. It's not like we have to dictate every move they make. If you tell a Zoid to go one way, it'll keep going that way until you tell it to change direction. They'll move to avoid obstacles in their paths, as long as they can detect them. Most Zoids will react on reflex if you tell 'em to move a certain way. Like, if you charge at an opponent head-first, the Zoid knows to try to bite whatever it's running at instead of just...I dunno, smashing its face into it or something." His eyes flicked toward one of the Rev Raptors, whose armor was shredded and mangled in such a way as to suggest that the Geno had very successfully not been smashing her face into them.

"Some Zoids are capable of moving around on their own - my friend Leon found one wandering around a canyon all by itself once, and one of the Zoids on our team kept throwing people out of its cockpit until it found a pilot it liked. Those're exceptions, though. Most Zoids just wait for someone to tell 'em what to do."

So far Zouichi hadn't seemed to take serious offense to anything Jamie'd said, for which he was immensely relieved. Unless the guy was just seething silently and planning to do horrible things to him in his sleep. His curiosity was still piqued - he wondered if Zouichi found it offensive or stifling to be compared to humans, what his own standards of success were - but he was starting to feel unsure of himself again and wasn't certain if he should probe any further. Not directly, at least. "I guess it's just...human bias. We think we're the best things around, so we're impressed when we see someone not-human doing things that we think demonstrate 'humanity,' even when it's pretty clear we don't have a monopoly on whatever trait it is we're focusing on," he ventured.

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

Zouichi frowned a little as he listened; the behavior of these Zoids didn't sound very much like anything he'd encountered on Earth. "So I take it Zoids are all apex predators? Or too large, at any rate, to be victims of predation? My Earth did have animals that were raised to be companion animals or mounts, but if they were ever abandoned in the wild, they would generally try to survive on their own or with others of their kind. Rather than waiting for further instruction, that is." Also, he'd been wondering about that mangling.

Sadly, Zouichi didn't generally make secret plans to do horrible things to people in their sleep. Generally speaking, if he took issue with someone, they knew about it. But in any case, Jamie seemed... unusually introspective. Thoughtful, even. Fifty points for Geno Saurer House.

"I suppose that makes sense. It just seems like an odd criterion on which to judge someone." Well. After all, didn't Ildraniath look at the world strictly through the lenses of what was Eldar? Still, being inhuman was what allowed Zouichi to do his job. Toua would never have placed so much of its future into the hands of a handful of baseline humans. The odds were simply too incredible.