trans_9 | Rust in Peace [Open]

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Rust in Peace [Open]

Zouichi, for once, wasn't in the City on patrol. Instead, he was making a systematic search of the city's streets, looking for telltale stray robot parts that might lead him to what he was looking for. Unfortunately, during SHODAN's attack, not all of the crew (except him! okay not really) had been terribly judicious about the property damage they were inflicting on the nearby buildings.

So there was rubble everywhere. Oops.

But it had been in the middle of a robot attack, right? Sometimes you needed to break a few eggs to make an omelet, right? RIGHT.

[This is the log for searching for robot parts and a SUPER SECRET ENGINEERING PROJECT okay it's not that secret but IT SORT OF IS. Feel free to have someone try and peek in on the Engineering thread ~~and have Lash furtively cover her test paper~~.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Gartered? Isn't hanging bad enough?"

"I'm looking for remains from that battle with SHODAN. There should be enough lying around, even with what cleanup took place." He motioned to Howard's wire. "Doing some stripping?"

"What?" Howard appears completely oblivious to how he's managed to trainwreck three common phrases all at the same time with that hanged and gartered comment.

"I got some of the remains at the Warehouse, if you want to dig through them. And yeah, figure it's about time I actually get out of bed and stop staring at the ceiling. The cats were starting to treat me like furniture."

"No... never mind." You know who was going to explain garters to you, Howard? NOT THIS GUY.

"And thanks. I think I'll take you up on that offer." Zouichi snorted. "Your cats treat everybody like furniture. The other day one of them used me as a stepping-stool."

He seriously thought the phrase was hanged and gartered okay.

Howard gets all the way out of the hole and waves a hand. "This way. And that's just because you're tall. They'd use me as a stepping-stool but it'd only get them to the kitchen counter if they're lucky. At least they're not trying to eat the fish so much anymore."

Zouichi followed him. "Well, I wouldn't mind so much if she hadn't sat on top of the refrigerator and stared at me until I let her use me to jump back down."

Caaaaats.

"All she's doing is staring at you, jeez. It's not like animals have some kind of telepathic control that makes you do their bidding." No matter what Alan may indoctrinate into Zouichi. "She could find her own way down."

"You mean you would have left her there?" Howard, you inhuman monster. Also this was probably why all the animals in the house had pegged Zouichi as a softie.

"Sure. There's the counter, the kitchen table, Allenby. Plenty of ways for her to get down. Did you know cats land on their feet? It's super cool, they do it like this." Howard holds his arms out and twists around, trying to imitate a falling cat.

Zouichi snorted at Howard's imitation, trying not to laugh. "Well, acrobatics or not, I couldn't just leave her there. But next time I'll call you into the room instead. How's that?"

oh come on that's an Oscar-worthy performance

"Sure. She can land on my head and scratch up my scalp. Awesome." Howard gives a super sarcastic thumbs up. "What do you want SHODAN pieces for anyway?"

"You'll look more distinguished with a facial scar or two," Zouichi said solemnly.

"And the answer is to use against the Daligig, of course. The more we have against them, the better."

"Don't tempt fate. Now I'm totally going to lose half my face in a near-fatal accident." Howard pretends to cover up his face from some unseen danger, but actually his mind skips over to envisioning what that would feel like, getting him in the face, and he wants to hide that he's wincing. He's been having that trouble, lately, thinking too vividly about awful things happening to him.

"How? Are we going to rebuild a terminator?"

"Not from a cat attack, I hope," said Zouichi. Although if that happened and Howard replaced half his face with metal, maybe he could be a supervillain.

"A Terminator? Well, I guess we could, but I was thinking more along the lines of trying to rebuild a power dampening device. No spreading that around, though. I don't even know if it'll work yet."

"You never know. A kitty cat once killed an old lady in my town. Turns out it had a brain tumor and went crazy and attacked her in the tub. True story." And totally not embellished by urban legend!

Howard makes a zipped-lips gesture and starts heading for the Warehouse. " Good ideaI don't know how to identify what I got, but you probably know what you're looking for."

He gave Howard a skeptical look; was this a mutant cat? "And I suppose she died from blood loss. Are you sure it wasn't a sabre-toothed tiger?"

"I destroyed several devices during the attack. It shouldn't be too hard to recognize the larger components. Even if I don't find any, power sources, memory chips, or other parts could be useful. Engineering can probably use whatever material they can find."

"Nope, regular cat. Albert got attacked by an evil cat too. Maybe I'm just lucky with my sweet and charming housecats."

You know, when they're not trying to lick the inside of his ear or eat his hand.

Howard gets on his bike and heads back to the Warehouse - he's built a little towing cage to fix to the back, where he keeps the lengths of copper wire he's stripped. When they get to the Warehouse, which has since become cramped and filled with legitimately dangerous amounts of stuff since Howard started using it as storage instead of as a home, Howard wraps the wire up over his shoulder, undoes the locks and shoves a door open.

"I have the dead terminators from Med Bay in here." Howard looks over stacked plastic boxes lined up against the wall. At the very least they're all labeled. "This one. Help me get it down?"

Boxes of dead robots are heavy, okay.

"Yeah, that must be it." Zouichi couldn't quite tell if Howard was serious about the evil cat or not, as usual. It sounded strange enough to be true in a world of talking coyotes and whip-handed zombies... but then again, Howard was prone to exaggerating.

He kept pace along with Howard's bike, but when they came to the Warehouse, he couldn't help giving the piled-up junk a wary once-over. "It looks like a hoarder's place. You should be careful, you know. Someday when you're here alone, one of these things might fall over and pin you down." And that would be just about the saddest, most ironic death ever.

Zouichi reached up, pulling down the box Howard indicated. "How did you get them all up there? And when did you collect them all?"

Why do you think Howard got Emergency Rations in the first place, Zouichi? Howard drops that train of thought there, not willing to get into a "so I got a pet just to torment my roommate" argument.

"...Man, don't give me more to be afraid about. And I'm not a hoarder. Hoarders are crazy." Howard pushes against the other boxes to steady them as Zouichi extracts the one with the robot parts. "I got Orc over here a few times to help organize stuff. It keeps him busy."

Two of the terminators have been broken down into pieces and stuffed into the box. In a state of boredom Howard doodles Sharpie mustaches and glasses on the faces before putting them away. "I grabbed them when I was cleaning up Medical. Pretty much everyone else was busy fixing the tavern or whatever, because they have priorities."

Zouichi sighed. "Of course. Why do we need medical facilities when we have alcohol?" Not that he'd ever really understood the point of alcohol, except for maybe that one time when he and Red Robin had gotten totally drunk and... anyway.

"Hoarders aren't crazy. They just feel the need to hoard things. If you hoard things, you're a hoarder." Yes, this conversation was now about the finer points of hoarding, okay?

Zouichi reached inside the box, pulling out an intact fuel cell. "These are explosive, you know."

Edited 2012-04-02 19:24 (UTC)

"Because people here are fricking idiots. It's not like the booze would even be totally gone, I mean, we have a beer tree. People here are just dumb." And that was the beginning of the end for Howard in Medical. Apparently people had better things to be doing than cleaning up the Med Bay, and those better things included getting drunk, and whoa disillusionment.

"Hoarders are crazy. Haven't you ever seen that TV show, what's it called, oh, Hoarders? I'm not a hoarder." Howard's very adamant about this. "I just keep stuff."

Howard cocks his head and inspects the fuel cell. "Really? ...Whoops."

That's not worrying at all.

He frowned. "Apparently. Speaking of which... have you seen Sakura around? I was starting to wonder if I should ask around again -- the last time this happened, she ended up in a completely different part of the ship." Although it was, of course, possible that GLaDOS had abducted her.

"...there's a TV show about hoarders?" That was news to Zouichi. Well, 1,000-year-old news. "If you say so, but I don't want to have to fish you out of any detritus."

Zouichi tucked the fuel cell away into one of his pockets. "Highly explosive. If you have any more of these around, you should get rid of them."

"Yeah. She's gone." Howard's expression flatlines there. It's clear that he's pretty upset about it and trying not to look it. "Repodded."

Sure, she may return, but Howard's not going to count on it. The people Stacy's spit back up so far have been people he doesn't want to see.

"Yeah, and some of those people are batshit. Hoarding baggies of cat puke and toenails and stuff that'll never, ever come in handy." That's the difference, see! Howard's stuff is potentially useful! Maybe! "If I'm ever stuck in detritus I'll page you on our little comm thingy."

Howard bites his lip and then shrugs. "There might be, but I wouldn't know where all of them are."

Oh god is this going to be the worst weekend project ever.

Yes, Howard. Everyone believed you. You were totally not a hoarder. "I'll try to get there in time. Anyway, I guess the good thing is they can't be ruptured easily by normal impact. But if a stray blaster shot goes off, or if something else in here sets off a reaction..."

Then it would be time to test Howard's luck!

Sakura, repodded? He wasn't really sure how to feel about that one. While Sakura certainly wasn't gone altogether (was, in fact, relatively safe and in stasis), she had been someone to talk to. Businesslike. Competent. Someone he could trust in a fight.

"She'll be back." He hoped, anyway. "You don't think it had anything to do with the Daligig?"

Edited 2012-04-02 21:02 (UTC)

"Red Robin came by here and gave me a safety inspection. I already moved the heater away from the things I had labeled explosive..." Howard grumbles. Granted, that was months ago, and he's accumulated more towers of crazy stuff since then, but he doesn't like having to constantly do safety upkeep. It's tedious but he'll worry if someone points it out and he hasn't fixed it.

Howard shakes his head. He doesn't want to get his hopes up that Sakura will be back. That would mean acknowledging that she made it to the friend tier, and he doesn't want to do that. "Maybe. We lost three medical people in like a week lately. It's only a matter of time before Faiza gets yanked too."

"Yeah, well. Maybe you should have him come by and give you another one." There had to be more than one fire hazard around here. Or explosion hazard. "Don't you inventory all your things?"

"...Maybe you should do a recruitment drive. See if anyone's interested in learning to be a medic." After all, they did need at least a couple people in there, manning the Medical Bay. Right?

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