March Catch-All | Network/Action

[quark_assassin]

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

[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.

Comments

[trpmods]

[I will have my workers pick one to manage, on the edges of the grove. They can reach several feet in a year, so we'll see what happens.]

In fact, she's quite intrigued. Management the Funfrond way was clearly not that of her species, and so to play with it could be fun. The other hives might be intrigued.

[Forgive the delay in our story telling of the history. I have had one of my workers going into the archives to fetch forward the oldest records. I do not remember things perfectly, it is better to give you fully accurate data from first person sources.]

[quark_assassin]

Fast-growing enough, then. Dustin nods, this time also with his head.

[A productive experiment came out of it, so it was worth the wait,] he taps with a shrug. Honestly, he'd allowed himself to get hideously sidetracked with the whole Plants thing - history is what he'd said he came here for, wasn't it? [Primary sources would be best. I won't need them for long.]

[trpmods]

He would not? How interesting.

[Our records are scribed to a size that is suitable to us. If you do not have a means to read the size, it will sadly be a while. I will have to relay it to you.]

[quark_assassin]

Dustin's eyebrows arc slightly. He probably should have anticipated this, and the fact that he hasn't is a legitimate problem; being able to perfectly remember indecipherably tiny writing is not going to help him read it later. Hmm.

[Can you write an example for me?] he taps. [Something in the dirt will work. Might have a workaround.]

Sorry for the delays

[trpmods]

Well of course she can. The Queen holds out her hand and one of the thorn swords are placed in her hand. She immediately starts to write. The characters, scratched into the dirt with the point of the thorn, are small, with multiple sentences easily etched into a square inch.

If anyone wanted a grain of rice written on, a Barry was clearly the ideal artist for the work.

[quark_assassin]

Simultaneously, Dustin pulls out his communicator and starts furiously tapping away at a new, but simple program. Just a modification on the existing video recording software, stripping away the bells and whistles, and...

"...There we go," he murmurs to himself - the first words Dustin's actually spoken in more than half an Agra-10 day - as he long-presses to save the new app. Magnifier_beta.exe is a quick-and-dirty pseudo camera application whose only purpose is to make use of the tablet's built-in digital zoom and push all resources into improving image quality. There's only so much software can do here, but as he hovers the communicator just over the tiny writing and zooms in, he's hoping it's enough to make out and tell apart the individual characters written in the dirt.

[trpmods]

The software can indeed do only so much, but more importantly, only so fast. It will take a few minutes for it to even begin to offer the first part of the image zoomed in. In that time a pair of worker Barry arrive, carrying between them a large shell. It seems to be something like a coconut, or worked down from a remarkably similar item. They carry it on sturdy metal rods between them, and since it doesn't seem like Barrys have metalworking, that's got to be its own question.

They set this down before the Queen and open the lid. She rises and moves to lift out a very thick book. One of several. The covers are made of some sort of hard shell or wood, and the pages between them very thin, almost like onion paper.

[Your method will work then? To help you read? There are many volumes, with Barry history mixed in with the information I imagine you will find important. They are the records of our people. I have commanded for only those around the years of great upheaval to be brought to be inspected. The other casks will arrive as needed.]

[quark_assassin]

Too damn slow. Dustin's frown deepens the longer he waits on his program to work, and by the time the Queen is ready with her own supplies, he's more or less given up on it as a suitable, immediate compromise.

[Forget it,] he taps sulkily (in the best way he can manage - a finger kind of twisting in the dirt as it hits a little too hard). [I can use this to learn the language for myself, at least, but it won't speed up the information transfer process.]

Dustin takes one last look at his tablet's screen at maximum magnification to internalize the tiny runes, letting the Communications data point ruminate in the background, before shutting the device off and sitting back on his haunches.

[Whenever you're ready.] He sighs, although whether or not the gesture translates to the Barrys is debatable. [I'll listen.]

again forgive the delay please

[trpmods]

The queen nods and has the workers bring the tome close and she begins to read. And she won't stop unless he asks it of her. She taps out a story telling of sudden environmental changes, with large structures causing earth shakes and carving through the earth deep down. In fact, there are a lot of deep description, using their units of measurement for when they saw the things, which was very rarely. Clearly whatever had done the damage were massive, even on a human scale.

Meanwhile rains are reported as changing, with their fall causing more plant damage, destroying plants and breaking down rock with a touch. This process is actually detailed over many years of records. One large metal thing cut up through the place that the Queen describes as the Quarry, where in the ground was emptied. Then a great rock fell from the ground and struck there. After that great metal structures like spiders arrived and shaped the stone into buildings like were there now.

All of this was the work of many years, and they even had records distressed contact from other plantkin. Meanwhile new plants are put in, and the great trees started to grow. The Barrys records indicated attempts to strike at these changes and take down the plants, and were attacked by the great metal spiders. They went into hiding for several years, noting only small changes for the life time of a fearful queen.

And then, at last, they moved out again, and there were large furry animals wandering around. They did not seem intelligent and did not communicate. There was war, but the creatures were capable of things the Barrys could not happen so they went again into hiding until great metal forms came from the sky and the animals left.

The whole telling takes nearly the rest of the day, with Workers clearly skipping quickly through records to find ones relevant to Dustin so the Queen could read them out without pause.

[Those are all of the stories of the time of the change. I can have our records searched for still more.]

[quark_assassin]

It takes a long time - much longer than Dustin had allotted himself for the evening and the start of night - but he listens intently all the same. This is simply too important not to pay attention. Unlike the descriptions given by the Funfronds, vague to the point of sounding like folklore rather than history, the Barrys' records are quantifiable, with detailed accounts and measurements that Dustin can actually keep track of. Several ideas and theories slot into his brain; he desperately wants to follow up on all of them. But he knows that the Queen won't have more information than what she's giving him now, since she wasn't there herself, and it's also getting quite late and Dustin has been awake for a very long time. He's aching for a nap.

[That isn't necessary,] Dustin taps. His hand never actually left the ground, and now his fingers are stiff from standing on the dirt. [Not currently, anyway. This is more than enough for me to process, and I've monopolized enough of your time.]

[trpmods]

[You have not delayed the work of the hive. The gifts you have given us have been ample. I name you Hivefriend. If you can assist with the stone trees, then you will be brother to the Hive. What my people can do for you I will give. I just ask that if we ask of you, you help us.]

No doubt that will be asked of him at a later time.

[Do you need shelter in the dark?]

[quark_assassin]

For definitely not the first time today, Dustin is surprised to the point of silence.

That's...it? That's all it takes? He can't help but feel like becoming a Friend to All Barrys would require more hoop-jumping and errand-running, more politics. Perhaps there's more waiting for him under the surface and he just hasn't seen it yet.

The promise of future tasks is, therefore, exactly what Dustin is expecting. He's almost relieved. [Of course,] he taps with a breath, relaxing slightly. [I repay my debts.]

Speaking of being in debt - [No need for shelter,] Dustin continues, glancing up at the sky. Based on the time elapsed, his path here, the position of the stars...yeah, he knows where he is. Taking the train back to Temba is preferable at night, anyway, while there's a lower chance of anyone else being on it and disturbing his sleep. [I have somewhere to stay.]