revivalproject | Fall In, Troops!

WHO: Omega and open~
WHERE: Outside of the library
WHAT: Patrolling like a good soldier!
WHEN: Nnnow?
WARNINGS: N/A

"All right squad, let's go over our mission again."

The young clone squats before several mothkittens, the latter in various states of attentiveness. One's sprawled out on its back, watching Omega as she gestures, another sits watching her hand the way a cat would a laser pointer, and the last two are a pile gnawing on each other, paused for the moment as they watch her anew while still holding onto an ear or a tail in their mouths. Up in a tree behind them is a larger mothcat, appearing content enough to lounge as she watches the children at play.

"We'll be patrolling the southern perimeter of the city square," Omega details, using the twig she has in hand to start tracing a rough map in the dirt. "Launch and I will take point, then Trapper and Tumble, and Dart, you're our rear guard. We'll start out facing the lakeside and keep to this side of the road. -yes, that's it right there, Dart. Can I have my stick back?"

She sighs as the little mothcat tugs at the twig she holds, grinning as she shakes her head and tugs it back a little before letting the winged furball roll about with it. Turning her attention to the one she's called Launch, she holds her arms out to catch the mothkitten as he predictably leaps up. "Okay, I think we're all set. Trapper, Tumble, Dart, let's go." Nodding to herself, Omega stands, letting Launch hop back out of her arms before she turns towards the tree and salutes the larger mothcat.

"We'll be back soon, Tony. Sure you won't come with us today?" She'll take that yawn as a no. "All right then. We'll see you later," she giggles, turning to head along. Naturally the mothkittens are quick to drift off in different ways than she'd outlined, but she doesn't seem to mind terribly as she sticks to her 'patrol' assignment.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

For comfort, for thanks. Omega was reluctant to pull away, even as she tried to keep a straight face when he ruffled her hair.

"Well..." She tilted her head, affecting a thoughtful pose. "I wanted to check on our rock friend, if he was still around. But first, maybe something to eat? Your talking about food earlier made me hungry."

The reminder of the rock creature made Tony blink and glance around the square, like he could have sworn he had just seen it, and couldn't figure out how something so big and destructive was so good at slipping into hiding. They definitely should have been keeping better tabs on it. But he nodded, agreeing that Omega should probably be fed, adding, "But we're not asking Billy. And these don't look ripe yet," gesturing toward the mothcat fussily cleaning her kittens' sleeping faces.

He offered a hand to lead them away then, toward the diner and more promising nourishment, chattering as ever as they went, "You know, I really thought you'd have much loftier plans, I was getting ready to bury bodies, take over the world, convince Echo to smile, that kind of thing. You have to start thinking bigger. A feast, at the minimum, we can start there..."

"Okay, no magical meals," she agreed, giggling a little as she glanced over at the mothcat pile.

"...I want to help the Agrii get their home back," Omega said. "They asked for help, after all. And everyone should have a place they can belong. ...but I think they need to learn to trust us more, so we can trust them too."

There was another insight that Tony hadn't expected to come out of Omega. If they were to believe the Agrii's claim on their face, that they did ask for help and weren't so aware of any outside influences, then it should have followed that they did trust their He Rows. They clearly didn't. How Omega had come to that conclusion was intriguing. "What makes you think they don't trust us?" he asked. "And--okay, so if that's true, what's the next step?"

The girl gave their hands a bit of a swing as she held onto his, looking down thoughtfully as she continued to walk along with him.

"There's not enough communication," she said after a moment. "I know they're scared to come here if the storms will harm them, so the distance doesn't make it easy, but they usually only talk just to give us information or do something special for us.

"We really don't know a whole lot about them, but they seem to know about us. The things they gave us... they weren't random. It doesn't seem fair that they know things about us without really getting to know us. Maybe they don't know how to get to know other people, after living by themselves for so long. So...maybe we should teach them? Try doing something for them and see how they respond?"

They were already doing something for the Agrii, Tony thought, under profound duress. Maybe not effectively, but it wasn't Tony's choice to live on this abandoned planet, so he frowned, looking skeptical. Winning over someone who wanted to do harm, even just to buy some time, though, wasn't an unfamiliar program. There must have been a way to extrapolate that to their alien kidnappers. "Make a show of loyalty?" he proposed as he pushed the door to the diner open for Omega. "Like a statue...or a church...," seemed like the scale they had to work on to get the attention of the people who lived in the sky.

"Not exactly," Omega said as she stepped inside. "Like...well, what would you do if you wanted to make friends with someone?"

She looked back at Tony as she posed this inquiry. Friend-making wasn't something she had really put much thought into. Thinking of those she'd met here, it seemed to happen on its own, but the advantage was that they were there to personally interact with.

Friends did just seem to happen here, and Tony didn't even have a credit card on him. He scratched at his beard thoughtfully, trying to reconcile the usual sequence of events with how difficult it was to talk to the Agrii; "Usually it would be a nice dinner, somewhere expensive, then a private concert, maybe a museum tour if that seemed to be their thing..." It seemed fairly unlikely that, even if the contact was easy, Tony could be showing the Agrii new experiences on their own planet while he was the bug in the code. "Flowers, definitely, if I don't know much about them yet. Everyone likes flowers." Except Cayde, but Tony was pretty sure that was a very rare exception.

Omega smiled a little, amused at Tony's thoughts. There hadn't been dinner at anywhere nearly expensive, nor a concert, but they had in a way gone on a museum tour, and there were flowers, when she'd first gotten to meet him and Jon.

"I guess we can't really send them anything, can we...?" she wondered, her smile fading into a thoughtful frown. "Oh! What about the box? They put things there for us when we ask, don't they? Can't they maybe receive things from there too?"

The box was profoundly untrustworthy to Tony. It had to be magic, and what the Agrii chose to use it for seemed regularly demeaning, so he raised a lip with concern. Sending something the other way, though, that couldn't be nearly as harmful, right? At worst, it would be jettisoned into the vacuum of space.

"What do you get someone who forces you to hang out at their house?" he asked in return. "One of your stuffed toys? They gave us some of those once. They must think that's a nice gesture."

"They did?" Omega's eyes lit up at that, breezing past the awkwardness of the previous question he'd posed. She'd pretty much been forced to hang out at someone's house in a way for most of her life, but she'd never thought of it as such, much less thought about a need to give anyone anything. Of course, there was the fact that she didn't really have anything she could give, either.

"Do you think they'd like a stuffed toy if we made them some?"

"If not," Tony declared with authority, "it will teach us something more about them, so we can better determine what they do like. Scientific method. We have our hypothesis, now we just have to try it out."

Making a stuffed toy was not exactly Tony's expertise, though, and he dropped the performance to suggest, "You show me how to make one, I show you how to make a fountain."

Omega nodded. That sounded like something Tech would say, but it made sense enough to her. She stroked her chin.

"I haven't made one before but I learned how to sew a little from Rey and Shiro. I made this bag at the faire!" She smiled, patting the bag that slung off her shoulder. "All right, I'll see if I can figure it out."

Fall In, Troops!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject