Dustin Silver (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
quark_assassin) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
revivalproject2023-03-09 01:14 pm
quark_assassin) wrote in revivalproject2023-03-09 01:14 pm
March Catch-All | Network/Action
WHO: Dustin, Barrys, various people
WHERE: Network, Sh'Ka, Temba, all over the place
WHAT: Dustin discovers some stuff and complains about it. Also, he's building things again.
WHEN: Through the first half of March
WARNINGS: Dustin. Will add as needed.
1. Network | Video/Text | OTA
2. Sh'Ka | Closed for Barrys
3a. Workshopping | Closed to Donatello
3b. Demolition | Closed to Link
3c. Construction | Amphitheater | OTA
5. Spores | Various Locations | OTA
WHERE: Network, Sh'Ka, Temba, all over the place
WHAT: Dustin discovers some stuff and complains about it. Also, he's building things again.
WHEN: Through the first half of March
WARNINGS: Dustin. Will add as needed.
1. Network | Video/Text | OTA
[It's nearly impossible for Dustin to think of a situation where broadcasting his location, live, over an Agrii-monitored network, could possibly be a good idea. Nearly impossible. But this planet is always full of surprises.]
[This is one of them. The camera cuts on to show Sh'Ka's iconic palace - or where it should be, based on the unusually large patch of short grass growing here amidst the massive trees. What remains instead is a giant pile of rubble. The camera pans around it for about thirty seconds, in complete silence, to show the scale of the destruction before shutting off.]
[Captioning it, in Dustin's characteristic pithiness: ]
What the fuck happened here?
2. Sh'Ka | Closed for Barrys
The Palace had been an incidental observation on his way to a greater project - something that Dustin has had in the works since last fall, actually, and was forced to put on hold when the winter's snows kept him isolated to Temba. Barry intel.
The 'hive' of Barrys he's been focusing on seems to be an especially active one that lives in the walls of Sh'Ka's Agriculture Building, and Dustin is pleased to note that the colony's drones are still alive and stomping around after Agra-10's deep freeze. His offerings today are perhaps lackluster compared to the ones he's left in the past, but unfortunately he has to make due with the small winter and early spring berries he's scavenged on the way here, with a handful of dried summer fruits to supplement. The small pile is left next to a trail Dustin has observed the workers frequently using.
Then there's nothing else to do but sit back several feet away, crouched in the shade of a young fruit tree, and wait.
3a. Workshopping | Closed to Donatello
The lack of snow and warming temperatures mean that Dustin isn't nearly so restricted in where he goes and what he gets done, but that hardly means he's avoiding his typical haunts. If anything, his workshop requires special attention right now; his telescope motor needs to be finished and installed when the nights are still cool and clear, while still avoiding patches of ice or snowmelt mud that could hinder its transport. That window is rapidly approaching and won't stay open for long.
It's one of those days of harried work, when he's spent hours fiddling with the code on his tablet, napped, snacked, then coded a bit more, losing track of what time of day it is save the little streaks of daylight streaming in through the boarded-up windows of his shop, when Dustin gets a single knock on his door. He straightens abruptly from his shrimp-like hunch over his communicator and waits.
Three seconds later, there are two more knocks.
Ah. Dustin hops out of the chair behind his workbench - what used to be a checkout counter - and strides to the door. "I hear you," he announces, loud enough to carry through the thick masonry walls. "Gimmie a sec to unlock the door."
A few extra manual locks have been added since midwinter. There's a series of at least five clicks, scrapes, and pops, then the door cracks open and Dustin peeks around to make sure it's Donatello on the other side.
3b. Demolition | Closed to Link
Finally, finally, the motor is complete. That just leaves the part Dustin had been dreading the most: Getting this fucking massive thing installed back in the stadium light he took it from. Getting it out and into his shop last year had been a production in itself, which is a lot of the reason why he'd been anxious about repeating the process in reverse. At least then he didn't have to worry about breaking it in transport last time - the thing already didn't work. But now it's got all kinds of delicate bits on it for precision lens movement and rotation, and Dustin's spent a lot of time on the initial calibrations while pairing it to the tracking program he wrote on his tablet.
He could have moved it again on his own, yes. Though the more he thinks about that process now, the more he's thankful for Link's offer to help instead.
Link will get that call in the early morning, about an hour before dawn, in the form of a picture of Temba's map sent to his personal inbox. The intersection between buildings Orange 8 and 9 has been circled in bright red. This, rather than his workshop proper, is where Dustin waits for Link to meet him, leaned against the rubble of Orange 8's walls and shivering against the lingering evening chill.
3c. Construction | Amphitheater | OTA
Once he and Link have extricated the motor from his workshop, rolled it to the Amphitheater, and reset it in the modified spotlight housing he left behind last fall, that just leaves getting the newly-minted telescope working again. Dustin spends the next week more or less living here to get this done. A decent chunk of that time is spent just cleaning up the old observation room he stayed in last year, and scrubbing the rust and debris off of the spotlight after three months of neglect.
Then, testing. Hours upon hours of testing. Some of this Dustin can do during the day, where he calibrates the motor and lenses by sighting in distant objects at the edges of Temba, but a lot of it has to wait for nightfall. Then he can start combining his mental star maps with his makeshift tracking software to have the telescope follow stars across the sky. This is a more passive process, where he sits back, takes measurements of the telescope's current position, checks the sighting scope and compares it to the observation piece, sometimes makes adjustments to one or both, then breaks to scarf down some dried Baconroom and wait for another thirty minutes in silence. It might seem like tedious work, but the entire time Dustin is practically vibrating with excitement, even if someone unexpected shows up in his workspace. Eight Agra-10 months of planning and naked-eye observation are finally paying off.
5. Spores | Various Locations | OTA
Dustin's final task for spring is one that happens between all the rest, generally when he's going from one location to another. The shortest path is always the preferred one, of course, but this month he's been going out of his way to take odd routes, circling areas that people don't frequent often, where he spots new plant growth starting to sprout with the warming temperatures. And where he goes, Dustin carries a jar with a sieved lid, filled with a powdery, partially aerosolized red substance. He pauses periodically to tap the jar over these islands of greenery, makes sure that a fine mist coats wherever he stops, and then, apparently satisfied with his work, continues on his way.
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[That is seriously disturbing. Why?!]
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Also, performed with materials that can easily be improvised.
The blast pattern is iconic of plastic explosives linked in series and detonated remotely.
Too pedestrian to be aliens.
One of us did this.
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[A lot of those settle in Dustin's mind as "blowing shit up for fun or attention," which isn't terribly promising. He's once again self-assured about his decision to keep the location of his workshop a secret; if someone with the resources to manufacture C4 and motivation to use it knew where he slept...well, he probably would never sleep again, at least not there.]
Hope it was fucking worth it.
Maybe they thought they would find something if it was demolished.
Maybe they did find something.
I'll keep looking around.
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It makes me think of this guy back home. The creep couldn't take losing, so he blew up part of my town when he realized he couldn't win against the people trying to rout him out. I guess he figured if he couldn't have the town, we couldn't either. It was so pointless and wasteful.
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I don't think anyone was using this for anything, so it's not a huge loss.
And I don't see any especially useful resources in the rubble to salvage.
Seems like more of a waste of explosives than anything.
Could have saved those up to try and blow out one of those sealed doors in Temba instead.
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At least, I'm not going to waste my time on that.
I'll help get essentials running and make the place survivable, for us and for them.
But there's no way in hell I'm letting them turn me into their personal contractor for some rich Agrii fuck's country club or whatever the hell this was.
Once they can stand to live planet-side again, they can rebuild that shit themselves if it's so important to them.
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Let's hope we'll have a choice.
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Probably won't.
[Adding another project to the list: Agrii mental blockers.]
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[He is not looking forward to anything like that happening.]
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[...Actually, this makes Radley a unique case. Huh. Dustin switches tracks.]
When we returned to Temba, did you end up touching the data point at the center of town?
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Interesting to know that the Agrii have us in their pocket as soon as they rip us away from our parent universes, no matter where they drop us off.
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[Radley looks angry again, but doesn't explode. He's badly shaken.]
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Wouldn't it be horrible if their little Heroes could act on their own free will?
We might decide to do something other than solve their problems for them, or something.
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[But he wouldn't want to leave any of them behind.]
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[But not Dustin. Maybe. His feelings are complicated.]
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Not you?
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No.
Not really.
It's complicated.
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I guess
I don't know
It depends, I think.
I just don't want to get stuck somewhere else and not be able to leave.
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And I doubt we would have the luxury of being able to keep, or study and replicate, the tech used to bring us here in the first place.
What's your world like, anyway?
I'm guessing interstellar travel isn't common there.
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It's very tech-oriented, but we haven't figured out how to travel to other inhabited planets yet, no. We're working on it; we've made it as far as our moon. Holographic tech is really advanced and 3D and people play card games riding high-tech motorcycles. Not me, but I mine the ore used to make the motorcycles.
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