[OOC: Bendytimed to shortly after Podpop, before Survivalist ends and before Mother Knows Best begins]

Jonas finished typing on his omnicom and published the invitation to the channel, then switched to a new window and resumed fiddling with the program he had been working on.

It was an open-ended invitation, but should something come up that needed his undivided attention (like an attack, Brainiac 5 making contact again, or Cassie wanting to do something with him) he could always edit the post with the new information.

Some of the people coming in might be surprised to discover that the head of Programming looked as though he had been programmed himself in the past. Jonas had considered giving them a heads up on that subject in the invitation, but had ultimately decided against it. If they could not cope the surprise of a synthetic person, they would likely have problems coping during a fight; and he would like to know that ahead of time so he could place them most effectively.

So he sat at his workstation and waited for his first arrival.

There was only one destination in mind when the war started: work. Billy had dashed down to the transportation tubes, arriving on the first floor when he'd hit a snag: a robot swarm already assaulting the Med Bay and Special Weapons. But that wouldn't stop him: his coworkers and friends could be there, and the lab could easily hold the key to fighting back. He'd struggled and shoved his way through, roughed up very well by the time he crossed the threshold of his lab.

The hordes were closing in. Only his guns and a narrow doorway stood between Billy and death, and so far it seemed that death was gaining the upper hand. Would there ever be time to cobble together a better solution or escape? He doubted it. Not unless help arrived for them.

(ooc: Defend the laboratory? Your characters can be trapped with Billy rigging together some kind of defense system or trying to get through to him. If it gets bad, though, they might all have to escape and blow up the tech...)

Zam Tolen hadn't been seen a whole lot around the ship. She had disappeared during Lirath and generally wasn't the most available though she was still hitting her Security patrols.

It was late at what passed for night on the ship, as she went to several places. Special Weapons was one place, where she was...building something. With no plans or references, just from her head.

The hangar was another place, where she was gutting a spaceship of certain pieces, shoulder deep in starship.

[ooc: She can be found at either place, just specify where she is.]

Several significant data reports were still trickling in, and already Billy's overworked mind knew one thing: this workload was going to be one of his least favorites. Overwhelming, exhausting, sometimes confusing, and with the pressure of time attached as well. Stacy could simply not be relied upon to give the crew a break, and thus they needed to be prepared for a battle like that again. As soon as possible. But how soon was that? Today's meeting's purpose was to make it as soon as possible.

On the board against one wall of the lab, he threw up a starting list of repairs that needed to be made. All the significant weapons and armor that had been turned in, important communications equipment, crew items requiring immediate attention for that person's full functionality, the most often used generic vehicles, and the specialty/personally owned vehicles. That group would be the easiest to select, he hoped.

How easy or difficult this would be would not be fully known until he saw a spread of who was assisting, and how many. Could they complete everything fast enough for the crew's satisfaction? That would be the main worry from here on out.

Billy was almost relieved when they started trickling in. As he waved, not quite as energetically as usual, they might notice one or two signs of the battle. His movements didn't look quite as easy as before, some trace of pain still behind them, and a long bandage now tied around his forehead. Some would look better, some would look worse. He sincerely wished to see more of the former than the latter.

They needed all the healthy help they could get.

Hiccup had something bundled and strapped to his back as he made his way through the hallways. He was sneaking, because that something was a present, and he didn't want its intended recipient to know it even existed before it was finished. Fortunately, she didn't tend to hang around Special Weapons that much, if at all.

"Hello?" he ventured quietly as he made his way into the room. "Thanks ahead of time, by the way. The deadlier I can make this thing the better."

Miraculously, happily, Billy had finally set foot on Transmigration Nine once more. It wasn't the cleanest or happiest of reunions on-board the ship, but what mattered most to him was that he had survived. His task now was to return to the routine as much as possible and assist with the Melting Clock situation.
( At home )
---

By the time he 'recovered' and returned to work in the Engineering department, Billy was in a notably sour mood. His best friends and his girlfriend, he'd been informed and seen, were children. Children who didn't have much longer to live if a solution couldn't be found quickly.

His priorities were simple: the Clock and any work that had been left behind. With the Engineering team noticeably smaller than it had been before, and several members of it having taken an involuntary leave of absence at the same time he did, there was undoubtedly much to catch up on.

The race against the clock continued. Billy took his seat at his desk, ready to plow through paperwork and status updates more quickly than ever before.

((ooc: This takes place between the Oryan and Time Dragon missions. It's split into two sections so I don't spam the comm even more than I already have---the subthread at his home is open to people who would reasonably be there, like Ronnae, Nokosi, and maybe Kaya. The section in Engineering is open for anyone who wants to catch up with him//update on the situation//beg him for treats and toys. A separate post for Romeo and Juliet will go up tomorrow or Tuesday.))

His omnicomm beeped with some vital message or another. He ignored it.

"Minion!" That was reflex. Minion wasn't here. "Brainbot! Your assistance, please?"

BAOW BAOW BAOW, the brainbot intoned.

"I just need a tentacle holding this right here--thank you. Whos'a good lil' brainbot? Whos'a good boy for helping daddy? You are! Yes, you are! Oh, look at you, yesterday, you were just learning how to fly and today, you're a big boy helping daddy around the lab!"

The brainbot's neural net sparked happily in response.

You never went wrong with positive reinforcement, as far as Megamind was concerned, and he really did appreciate the assistance. After the initial bad impression he'd made after pod release (really, what had he been thinking?), he was amazed they had even hired him to work in the Science and Engineering departments, and didn't exactly expect anyone to be willing to assist him with his project (not that he'd really asked, because if he had, he might have been surprised).

He was used to working alone, though, and he didn't have to work entirely alone, as one of his first projects had been making some brainbots out of the scrap material he'd found there.

What was he working on? Well, only something that'd get him in the good graces of the crew...he hoped. It had been hard enough proving himself to the people of Metro City. This paranoid bunch of motley do-gooders had apparently had some run-ins with villains before, and given his history, that mean he needed to start off on a good foot doing this good guy stuff.

And maybe, just maybe, if he kept it all up, Roxanne would fall for him again as deeply as she had before he'd been taken. Maybe. Of course, that was something he tried not to think about, the fact that she didn't remember a great deal of their history together. Six months was a considerable amount of time, time that could never be recreated, not exactly as it'd happened. He simply had to hope things would work out as well as they had the first time, that he wouldn't mess anything up, that...

BAOW? The noise was almost questioning, and Megamind realized he'd frozen in place, not doing anything, his eyes looking past his little project.

"Hmm? I seem to have gotten lost in my thoughts," he said to the brainbot. "Keep holding that right there, and I'll activate the energy core..."

The weapon sparked to life, a charge cascading throughout its circuits. It cast a crackling light over his blue face, and Megamind started to cackle loudly.

"With this weapon, I, Megamind, Master of All Villainy, will drive my enemies to their many-segmented knees!" his voice boomed through the lab. A thought occurred to him, thought, and he amended, "That is, if they even have knees! If not, it'll drive them to whatever body part serves the capacity of knees for their species! Or to some other assorted body part that's unpleasant to be driven to!"

He let off another masterful cackle, just because he felt like it. Old habits really did die hard.

That's when he heard the footsteps and noticed he had a visitor at the door. Looking back, goggles askew, he looked awkward for a moment, and quickly amended, "I meant: 'I, Megamind, master of all heroism.' This is a weapon to use against the Ohm. Not to use against innocent people, since that would, of course, be evil. Which I'm not. It's a horrible death weapon of--of...goodness."

BAOW, intoned the brainbot, and it was very clear what it was trying to say: Awkwaaaard.

[ooc: First person who tags in gets the monologue. Any others get similar evilish talking, so you can just assume he was cackling over his genius in any subthread.]

Lex Luthor was never not up to something. Someone as driven as him was never prone to be idle, even if he was being quiet. And Lex had been relatively quiet recently.

Today, however, he broke away from whatever had been keeping him busy to do something a bit more mundane. Namely, some engine theory.

Previously, there had been a project to upgrade some of the mobile suits using engines from the X-Wings. The project had to be abandoned, however, due to that pesky thing called the laws of physics. The mobile suits, on average, had more than 70x the mass of an X-Wing. Moving the engine from an X-Wing to a mobile suit was a lot like taking the engine out of a suped up hot rod and putting it in a tractor trailer that was hauling 35 tons up a hill; you can't do that and still expect to go from 0-60 in under six seconds.

Not without causing the engine to explode, at any rate.

However, as Lex realized with a burst of scientific inspiration, there were ways to adapt some of the deign ideas and philosophies from the X-Wing's engines to that of a Mobile Suit's. If his design worked, the would be a marked improvements in speed and thrust. (Of course, by his estimation, there wasn't anything on this ship that couldn't be improved by him, but that's neither here nor there.)

Which is why he was in Special Weapons today, having taken over a good sized chunk of the common area. There were engine schematics spread out all over the place, and a couple of transparent dry erase boards that had a number of equations scrawled all over them. Yes, Lex was a man with access to cutting edge tech, but having his work spread out as such gave a sense of the big picture that a computer could not. Though he did use a computer to verify his numbers.

Yet, judging by the way he was staring his pile of papers, his face a mask of concentration, some of those numbers just weren't adding up quite right.

"There's something I'm missing here," he muttered to himself, scanning over the work to try and see how he could pull it all together.

Anwei wanted a messaging laser so hard that she could taste it. A nice, simple, hand-held, low-fade messaging laser would have let her contact every ship grounded on Gondepetil in one sweep. It would let her send messages to other ships in space or the Bleed, if they had their receivers open. Just let her get through to the Vizsnunishne – somehow – and she would be on her way to finding out what was actually going on. The laser was standard equipment, really; shouldn't every ship have one?

But there was no sign of one in the Armory (or if it was there, the index wasn't showing it to her). She'd have to see if the parts were available to build it herself. Most of what she needed was in Engineering, but not everything; if she could find a precision micro-mirror array chip, she wouldn't have to make the targeting mechanisms quite so precise. And she wanted an optical linkage to the data transmission system, so she could carry information on a shielded datastore and not have it out in the open until she was ready to send.

She changed out the denim shirt she normally wore over her plantsuit for the grey jacket she had bought in Orongo; the spattering of alien text across it apparently read 'Love is a river, dive on in' but hopefully nobody would stop to read it. Then she went down to Special Weapons and started doing inventory – or rather, started searching for the parts she needed while labeling everything that she recognized on her omnicomm. She was trying to be useful, and if the search served her own purposes as well, who would be harmed?

And tinkering starts.... NOW!

Ronnae had been eager working up a storm the last few weeks. Both driven by the amount of new things to work with and the excitement of being entrusted with work from her department's head. She feverishly worked whenever she wasn't called in to hang with some of her new friends and her friend from back home, Nokosi.

She started up with the basics of her training back home, just so she could see if she could replicate the process with the new tools at her disposal and even improve on them.

She started with light amounts of blasting powders and metalworking. Tubes, bolts, modulators and other assortment of basic parts for basic creations like Gun Scopes, Small Explosives (since she didn't want to set the department on fire.), primitive guns and other items. She took great pleasure in making one of her favorites, and decided to test them out immediately. She put on the boots hastily and stood up; however the boots clicked on instantly and she was pummeled into her work bench with a loud 'CRASH!'

"Ow ow ow ow..." She brushed herself off before standing hurriedly, looking around to make sure she was still alone. She seemed fine enough, for someone who didn't show a powerful build she was exceedingly resilient, specially to those who had gotten to see her in combat.

There were two items that were currently on her priority list; cloaking and barriers. The teleporters would be trickier so she would leave those for later.


( TESTING! )


((OOC note: You are free to interact with her at any of these times, thread crashing is fine, the more people the merrier.))

Ronnae walked cautiously, following the directions sent to her. Once she entered her eyes grew wide, her youthful face lighting up excitedly. She ran to the different objects and tables all over the room admiring the different new things she'd never seen before. And others that universally looked familiar.

"Cogs, sprockets, sockets and wheels! Grease and tools and lights and batteries! I definately reached the cool part of the ship!" She bounced excitedly holding her skirt down quickly as she tried to compose herself. She put her hands into her hoody and tried to remain calm waiting for someone to show up and tell her what she needed to do.

[[OOC: Closed. Warning for graphic torture, language, and death.]]

After Punishment, Big Zero had kept to herself. She'd gotten an all clear from one of the doctors- some guy named Howard. She left medbay and holed herself up somewhere in the city. She didn't want to talk to anyone, especially not about what she went through. She spent her days planning how she could hack into Stacy's mainframe. She was actually careful about not getting more violations.

But after a while, the lingering pains in her body faded. She thought more and more about what she could do to get back at everyone who'd ever given her a violation. At the same time, she wanted access to more information and technology. It became obvious who her first victim should be.

Jonas was ideal only if he could be deactivated, which was virtually impossible while he was awake. "Iron Lad" on the other hand, now he had some sophisticated technology, and he was only human. It wasn't that hard to find him. She just walked (O.K., sneaked into) the Special Weapons Lab and there he was, sleeping at one of the desks. She had to give him props as he was still wearing his armor. He wasn't too dumb after all.

It took a while, but she was able gain access to the armor's systems. It was a challenge to do it without waking Nathaniel but she had quick, light fingers and years of practice. Once she had looked through as many systems as she could without risking triggering the next security stage, she set to work rewiring subroutines. When she was done she leaned back.

"Initiating voice system test." The armor spoke in Big Zero's voice.

"What the fuck? Shut up! Shut up!" She whispered.

Big Zero had mostly kept to herself. She was busy plotting certain people's demise and reprogramming. A big part of dropping off the radar was simply for safety reasons. But when she went out she spent time in the Special Weapons Lab working on, well, things that weren't weapons. She wasn't that stupid. If she didn't give them a good reason, they couldn't refuse a member of the crew. Certainly not someone as productive as she was.

So with all the confidence of someone with antisocial/narcissist personality disorder, she strolled into the lab and quickly started work on Egghead mark II. Frankly, it was a lot harder building the damn thing from scratch.

[[OOC: Big Zero post, standard warnings apply. Filthy language, Neo Nazi. Also she will probably be hitting Punishment this post so threads might have to be bendy timed a little (later ones go earlier). My tags will be slow as I have one paper to seriously work on starting tomorrow and I'm running in to pain issues today. Agh sorry for tl;dr]]

Their experiments were nearly always weird, but in this case, it just might become downright disgusting.

Coming down the hallways is Billy Cranston, carrying a container of everyone's favorite nutritious slop. It's a wonder how he can see around it, as it's half as big as he is. If anything's for sure, it's that the intention is not to eat it. As he walks, he manages to move his mouth to the hand bearing his comm ring. Time to leave a message for his partner in the lab.

((I'm transporting the slop now. The other supplies are in my backpack.))

When he finally reaches the entrance to their Special Weapons laboratory, he pauses for a moment and rests. He hopes he never has to deal with this much slop at once ever again. But at least they'll be building something useful---and it was great that Jamie had progressed enough to build this with him! It would work. It had to.

[[ooc: Jamie and Billy are building a project that's going to fail this time, but that's okay! Feel free to gawk at Billy in the hall, both in the lab, or try to help them out. Just let us know.]]

[Bendy-timed back to just after the engineering meeting, closed for Fifth Doctor]

The meeting had proved quite interesting to Celena.  Gave her a good deal to think about, both about the department itself, the people within it and the projects that had been brought up. Needless to say she would be looking further into the department herself. Apart from simple interest in it all she had gathered two particular outcomes from the meeting, one a possible step along in the completion and work of a project she'd been working quietly for the moment, and the second an encounter with one calling himself the Doctor and a request to talk with her after the meeting.

And thus here she was, waiting near the door to Special Weapons, waiting for the Doctor patiently. A softly glowing crystal device held to a thin chain hanging around her neck displaying what seemed to be a holographic schematic of a device of some kind, what it was was hard to tell as the dragoness manipulated the image thoughtfully, though a light swipe of a paw would disable the image once the Doctor approached her.

This really should have happened months ago, but it was finally happening.

The engineers were having a meeting, and Billy couldn't be more nervous if he was presenting his best work to the scientific greats. And if he thought about it, he probably was doing that on some level.

Once the announcement was made, Billy gathered his strength at the lab board. Upon it, he'd scribbled drawings, lists of names, and possible project ideas. He also held a datapad in his hand, listing possible courses of action in the event that certain people were abducted and erased.

No matter how much he planned, though, the direction of the meeting would depend on what the members brought to the table. They could oust him, they could propose a death weapon, they could complain, they could blow something up, and they could do so much more. He would really have to wait, see, and try to restrain them from killing each other.

Resigning himself to his fate, he looked to the doorway and waved to the first arrivals.

[ooc: Anyone who would have responded to his request or been interested at all is welcome! There will be subthreads for different topics, and it will be open as long as it needs to be because I know we have some hiatuses right now.

We'll start with the mingling and slowly get the ball rolling!]

Is Special Weapons a classroom today?

No, but the young man in glasses with a slight limp scribbling furiously on a new whiteboard definitely makes it look like one. The scattered tools suggest an 'absent minded professor' vibe. Someone hasn't bothered to sort everything yet.

On the board are drawings of various Ohm in varying quality with an ever growing list of their strengths and weaknesses. Suggestions for small arms and techniques to deal with each Ohm type most effectively are being listed to the side.

On another wall, blueprints of the small arms scribbled on the whiteboard are slowly accumulating on the row of datapads propped against the wall. Someone had been working overtime while confined to his bed. Blueprints for shielding devices and armor are starting to crop up as well. They can't focus solely on offense.

Slowly, the plans are starting to build. But they need all the input they can get. Hopefully others will soon answer the notice he sent out.

((OOC: Hey, feel free to talk to Billy or whoever else you find here about Ohm plans and reorganizing things! I'd just like to ask that we hold off on discussing Lex's plans/the superweapon until I get a chance to coordinate with Will and the mods about what they want to happen and what's allowed.))

If anyone has been watching the hallways leading to Special Weapons in the past few hours, they'd likely notice Billy bustling back and forth from all over the ship. Whenever he has a break, he departs the lab and searches. Each time, a dirty and discarded something comes back with him to rest just outside the entrance to Special Weapons.

( Trail of junk, making a bunk... )

Cassie had received permission from Billy to reserve some of the Special Weapons lab just for this meeting.

Honestly, Cassie had no idea what they were going to talk about but she did have vague plans in mind. Mostly she wanted everyone to get to know each other and hang out.

Until then she was working on a spare project- an Ant-Man helmet. Sure, she was never going to use it, probably because she would never actually get it in working order, but it was something to pass the time.

Samus had been through hell and back. Several times by now, actually. That never seemed to slow the hunter down, though. There was always work to be done. When Samus got knocked down, she had to pick up and keep going.

It just so happened that the last thing to (literally) knock her down was an anti-tank rocket. Fortunately, she had a full suit of powered armor to protect (mostly) her. Unfortunately, it kind of did some serious damage. Nothing she wasn't able to fix, she just needed time do do so.

The hunter patched her injuries up well enough and hauled herself down to the engineering department, picking out a spot in special weapons to start on the tedious task of restoring her armor.