revivalproject | Connect This Space Between

Entry tags:

Connect This Space Between

WHO: Donnie and you..?!
WHERE: The Warrens
WHAT: Taking things one step at a time...
WHEN: Post volcano eruption
WARNINGS: N/A
NOTES: Will match tag format.

i. hanging in there
The trip down had more or less been a mechanical process. Just follow everyone down, one foot in front of the other. For all that he's observed, the whole matter of a volcanic explosion happening somewhere overhead was still a difficult thing to process, or perhaps it was just everything else with that just topping it all off. He'd traveled in uncharacteristic silence, just waiting for that last straw that would possibly make him snap.

Thankfully he's been able to hold it together. Fresh water helps, and having other things to mind has kept his thoughts from spiraling completely out of control. It might be an odd sight to see a humanoid turtle carrying a makeshift tank with some kind of local alien turtleish creature in it, but Donnie's clung to it like a lifeline. And then there's DATA, Tony's strange little robot-spy-camera who's apparently been demoted to a cantaloupe as Donnie's chosen method of carrying him along is by a net-like bag. But now there's space and they can rest, so they're set down while the teenage turtle tries to get some feeling back in his fingers as he slowly allows himself to start assessing their new surroundings. Data collection usually helps him relax.

ii. like mapping out dungeons
Being underground isn't really a problem for him. He's more or less lived underground all his life, and compared to the sewers of New York, this is far less complicated to navigate.

Donnie takes to mapping things out, wandering the strange tunnels. He hasn't yet managed to cobble together a replacement computer for the one he sorely misses wearing on his arm, so he's doing things the old-fashioned way, with pencil and paper. He's tackling things in sections, intent on working out every possible direction down one way before he'll commit to the next. Which will explain his absence from the main area at given times. This may not be some technical project to work on, but he's approaching it the same way, completely caught up in his findings.

Someone might want to make sure he remembers to eat or you know, sleep.

iii. no time for idle hands
If he'd been completely without some sort of access to tech he might have lost it by now. At least here the atmosphere is much more inviting than Calibrations. But it also means there's no doors he can close when he wants to keep to himself and work on things. Not that he's finding himself too bothered by people.

His main concern is potential fire hazards, and what with moss and mats everywhere, at times Donnie gathers up some of his things and relocates himself down some tunnel or another where there's less of a risk of burning anything when he tries to do some circuitry work or welding.

iv. aces wild
Choose your own adventure! Throw me a starter or whatever.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Oh man, they were the worst, there were several of them and they were stealing people's wallets!" Donnie was in full agreement there, little roaches were bad enough but not unbearable at least.

He paused then, giving Tony a flat look. "Okay, I appreciate not going the roach angle- not my type anyway but don't you need to actually be in high school first for that sort of thing? Look, you already know my social circle pretty much consists of the fam."

Naturally, the giant cockroaches were not doing anything galaxy-ending enough to justify just how much Tony didn't like them, either. That sort of thing could really ruin a person's life, though, so in this case he could see the argument for sending every one of them to the Negative Zone. "I take it I have you to thank for never having met the things myself," Tony acknowledged with a respectful bow of his head. That was true heroism.

A hero wasn't always the most attentive, though, so Tony wasn't that surprised that he had to ask, "What do you think we've been talking about this whole time? You and the rest of these kids can't just miss out on learning calculus because you were kidnapped, getting back to your normal life is going to be hard enough."

"Sure, just don't get too cozy with the street mascots out in Times Square," Donnie advised. Just in case. He and his brothers hadn't since had encounters with any mutant roaches, but then they hadn't had to scrabble some money together to buy their dad any new clothes lately either.

"...I thought we were talking about school-school, like...classes and learning and I don't know, I guess smelly gym socks? But mostly the learning! -do they teach beyond calculus level?"

"I'm sure we can rustle up someone here that's willing to teach you dynamical systems," Tony said, not sure if Donnie understood still yet, and if he did, whether he was actually on board despite the non-traditional experience they would be limited to. "There might be at least one person with more practical experience than you back in that room. The population here is extraordinarily brilliant, as if being beautiful wasn't enough for them."

The connections were still in progress, his tendency to overthink knotting itself in this nebulous potential of going to school. He followed the tangle instead of obvious, but was finally forced to abandon it, pick up the limp thread he'd overlooked, study the potential there, albeit with perhaps a little less enthusiasm because once again, there were limitations, given parameters to work in.

But it was something, and that was better than lamenting about losses. Donnie grasped that thread hard, pulling himself out of another dip in his mood. Emotions were annoying.

"I guess anything's possible. Not like I've had extensive conversations with people about potential teaching credentials or scholarly interests in general."

What enthusiasm. Tony snorted, and suggested, "Try not to intimidate them too much," because they didn't have that many people willing to take on the teaching task in the first place. With a flick of a finger toward the machine, he said, "First big project can be figuring out how to get hands on this thing. Or maybe that can be your club activity. I don't know, there's going to be some crossover, better keep an open mind."

"I'll try," Donnie said in a way that suggested this was not a promise. He looked back over at the machinery, mouth twisting in an annoyed frown.

"Well, to be fair I don't know that getting our hands on some of this machinery is ideal. A lot of it's for practical operations so far as I've been able to tell. Clean running water, possibly air filtration, climate control. But getting rid of this shielding is definitely on my list. There's a door with the same thing going on and no controls on this side of things to open, but something's got to be generating it all. I'd look for some main wiring, a control panel or something but it's not really obvious where to start looking, and if it's on the no-tamper list, my goggles aren't going to find it."

Another taunting door was worse news than this machine. A door was supposed to be a simple mechanism, literally designed to be bested, and Donnie had proven he wasn't terribly bothered by a door. Tony frowned, unsettled by its existence, when it was provably easy to hide from them. Either it was yet another detail meant to send them spinning, or being down here really wasn't part of the game.

All of that tapped into his chest, and the only part he said out loud was, "Good thing you know they aren't going to find it." That was effectively a big, pulsing target.

"No, but the fact that the shields exist means something has to be generating them, and something's been keeping this entire place powered. My goggles would make it easier to trace but since someone doesn't want to play fair-" Donnie, you're the one that was technically cheating- "Then we'll just have to do things old school."

He got up, wandering over to the machinery there, looking where the shields started and for where they might be coming from.

"No, yeah, I..." Tony started, because he had understood what Donnie was saying about the wiring the first time, but then Donnie was up and seemed to have figured out what Tony had been trying to tell him about a decade ago. Maybe he'd figure out that his goggles telling him nothing was telling him exactly what he needed to know in his own time, too.

"Okay, walk me through it," Tony invited instead, not following this time but finally untangling, sitting up with his legs crossed where he could balance his hands on his knees. "Power isn't ever 100% efficient. There's going to be heat, maybe vibration, and if you can't find either of those, look for what's managing them."

It wasn't anything he hadn't figured out already from Calibrations, but he was mostly still sore about there being any hindrance at all, particularly when his tech was supposed to help with figuring things out. What was the point when none of it worked when it counted? It was a sore spot when you identified closely with your technical prowess.

"...power efficiency, huh. Well, the shield itself isn't blocking off any more space than it needs to. I however am not seeing anything relatively suggesting a source," he muttered, stooping down as his hands followed the curve of the shielding down to the floor. "Not much by way of temperature difference where it connects, or at least nothing suggesting it's emitting from the floor itself. The machine's already outputting its own vibration and noise so if something's built into it or under it, it's masked."

"Or it's somewhere else," Tony proposed. "It's not the only shield. Benefit to keeping them isolated to their target is that a compromise is localized as well, but that's about it. Is there a benefit to keeping them centrally located? Better question, roll it back, how is this place supposed to be used, if we're not the ones that are being kept from touching their stuff?"

"Or that," Donnie conceded with a nod. "I postulate that this is an enormous ship of sorts."

Unfolding from his study of the machinery, he turned to an empty space of floor- for which there wasn't really any shortage of at least, dropping down to sit as he once again pulled out his notes. After some brief consideration, he began pulling each page of his mapwork out, laying it on the ground in correspondence to where one ended and another began.

"We're only looking at a limited area too, no telling whether we're anywhere close whatever accounts as the command central or even an engineering room and-"

He paused as he placed another page down. "...are you seeing this?"

While Tony had only lifted his chin watchfully, like he could deny how closely he tracked each page, Donnie's invitation had him rolling forward onto his knees to crawl closer and glare down at the map with intent. It was a lot more structured than it felt like from inside, if Donnie's estimations were accurate, like they weren't just banging their heads against a machine in here, but the whole thing was the machine. "What makes you say ship, specifically?" Tony muttered, still staring at the map.

They were as accurate as he could get, anyway. At least he'd replicated graph paper so all the lines were neat and it was easier to match up squares once pages ended and another began.

Donnie looked at this new discovery, fascinated. Sometimes you needed to step back and look at things. It couldn't all be just some personal aesthetic, there had to be some method to this madness.

"Because..." he began in his most solemn tone, "...I really want it to be a space ship."

Look, he was still a sci-fi loving teenager, so sue him.

Tony did look up from the map then, eyebrows raised without actually expecting any further elaboration. It took effort not to laugh outright and discourage any of Donnie's conviction, so Tony couldn't quite hide the amusement in the tug of his smirk before he was peering down at the notes again and giving a nod to encourage, "Okay. Let's work from that hypothesis. What does that make the volcano, some kind of propellant?" He sat back on his heels, trying to work out what else would possibly support this theory, and wasn't coming up with much, except that the whole place was clearly artificial. "You know," he started, not sure what it meant yet, "When I was out at those mountains, before they took out my suit, at that elevation, there was...The only explanation I have is that there was some kind of unnatural light refraction. The stars were closer. Or I wasn't getting enough oxygen, six to one."

"An inconvenience. The volcano wasn't here until a month ago, I'm not sure if that's directly related to this place, and if it is, it's just some big excuse to herd us all down here."

Donnie looked at Tony, head tilting as the man recounted his attempted venture. "Is anything even real? There's only so much that we've been allowed to see, emphasis on allowed. Oxygen's a questionable detail- does your suit have some kind of life support?"

"Yeah, I was just pretty high up--never mind," Tony said, flapping a hand to dismiss the possibility that he was an unreliable source for now. That should have just been a constant factor in their discovery process, not something to linger on. "What do you mean, unrelated--You think this ship is just this, underground...unit?" he had to clarify, swinging his hand around to encapsulate Donnie's map, because that would mean they were talking about different ideas. In Donnie's version, they would have to be ignoring that a space ship is at its most pointless when underground.

"-are you suggesting that the volcano's formation is due to this thing's sudden operation?" Because that wasn't an angle he'd considered, but then he supposed it was as possible as anything at this rate.

"It's clearly been here a long time, it might be older than Temba, in which case I'd love to know how it's been keeping its basic systems functioning. But so far as volcanic activity goes, this is the first time any of that have been kidnapped have witnessed such an event. Has anyone asked the plant guys how often mountains decide to come up and then burst their top around here? They seem to be the only ones who might've been here long enough to know. Maybe they know how long this thing's been around too."

"Are you suggesting this thing wasn't operating until now?" Tony responded, not sure which one of them was making more unsubstantiated assumptions. "Forget timelines, time doesn't matter to the beings running this place, I bet you I could describe your favourite street corner in New York down to the smell on Wednesdays but I guarantee you we're not going to agree on what year it is, time is not a restriction in this situation and even if it was, they lie about it, that thing that shot information directly into your dome was a lie, this city is an infant." Tony took a breath, all of that time talking not enough to save him from having to prepare himself to admit, "We should probably ask them."

That was a lot to be slapped upside the head with. Throwing the factor of time out the window was a hard thing to swallow, and even though Donnie had suggested as much a moment ago, that Tony was saying everything could be a flat-out a lie was like watching him pull at whatever neat threads Donnie had been trying to tuck into a nice little granny square and seeing every single thing unravel into oblivion.

What did that leave him with then, if it was all pointless? No, not necessarily pointless, but it still suggested that he was wasting his own time, trying to come up with angles and formulas. And it wasn't that Tony was wrong. It was clearly Donnie's fumble, in his mind. Go back to the drawing board, rework all his theories without being able to nail down any facts. It stung.

That Tony was at least in agreement about talking to the Funfronds did little to make him feel better. Wordlessly, the turtle started picking up the pages of his map, carefully keeping them in numerical order before tucking them back into the rest of his notebook.

The silence only disturbed by the rustling of the pages was painful to Tony, and at first he could only punctuate it with a sharp intake of breath that he then blew out wordlessly, all of that energy going to drumming against his thigh without anything more productive to say on the tip of his tongue. Clearly, everything he had already said was more than enough to discourage Donnie, and he should have stuck to asking questions.

"I'll let you know if they say anything," he eventually muttered, gathering himself up and hoping at least getting some distance from that callous machine would be a relief. It wasn't, really. He could still hear it in the walls.

Good news on the whole talking to Funfronds thing. Truth was that most of the Funfronds hadn't had a lot of engagement with the 'guests' of the Agrii. They were clearly so intrigued by talking animals that it was rare for one to go far, even into the Warrens, without at least one Funfrond around.

There is a pair in this case, one a ghostly shade of white speckled with purple spots, the other tan in the stalk with a yellow and red crown. They almost jump when they see Tony getting up to move. They had been trying to stay out of sight after all.

Prey instincts were always going to linger.

Being watched like that felt like they were in some weird, new experiment, quantum observation, and Tony could only react to it with an exhausted droop of his shoulders at the shudder of reliable movement. It wasn't like he could get any more humiliated. He raised a hand in greeting that he wasn't even sure they understood and drew closer, then down into a crouch with his knees tight to try not to loom over them too much. His communication was still a full body movement, just subtle, short gestures as he tried to ask, "Do you want to know what we're talking about?"

The speckled Funfrond bows a confirmation to Tony. More information is always useful.

[Study many ... of animals. Intriguing.]

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