revivalproject | RATtrap

Entry tags:

RATtrap

WHO: Tony and Cal
WHERE: The Agrii ship and the Mainframe
WHAT: ReBoot. You guys know ReBoot? 🍁
WHEN: March, after the AI message
WARNINGS: Extra fake violence?

Returning to the ship had not been part of the plan. The plan, however, had not factored in the sheer amount of activity back in the city, so keeping his distance had become more relative. It still made Tony anxious to pass by the Glitter Food, then disembark on the Agrii ship in a slow saunter that might have come across as a swagger as he took his time assessing who was in the hangar and how to best get by without being engaged. Compared to the hangar back in Temba, it was downright peaceful, without so many little bots learning their basic programming and plants chattering anxiously. Tony could push his sunglasses back up his nose and heft D.A.T.A. against his chest, patting the side of his shell restlessly. Maybe it wasn't so bad. The trip had given him a few more hours before he had to say goodbye to the little nuisance.

It was only when he was close to the engineering bay that he sent Cal the text, brief and to the point. I'm here. Going to try the astromech. The timing was meant to reduce how likely he was to be seen around anyone else, but it didn't account for the cluster of Agrii around Enide's casing, slowing Tony's approach cautiously. They did seem excited to see him when they noticed, but it was Enide who greeted him, causing the Agrii to scatter and leave Tony considering the tools left for him. While Enide explained that she intended to go into stasis and these gloves and helmets were to interface with her in that state, Tony set D.A.T.A. down on the console to extend his spidery legs and wander a familiar ginger, tapping rhythm along the metal, leaving Tony's hands free to examine the new interface curiously.

"I kind of brought what I hoped was a workaround..." he ultimately said to the AI, thought he hadn't put the strange headgear down yet. A workaround wasn't actually as effective as eliminating the problem. Even if it meant putting his trust in untested devices and dampening his senses. And connecting to her network via Extremis only had him bouncing off of those same bugs. D.A.T.A. came tip-tapping back toward him, peering up at him with that big, guileless camera eye that said the bot knew exactly who Tony was. He didn't need Tony to mutter, "See if you can find a place to plug in," to keep him busy while Tony brought the helmet up.

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Cal chuckled a little. "Non-transferable, unfortunately. Actually, it's pretty terrible, having a bunch of kids wander icy caverns alone. We're on a time-limit too. To get in, the ice had to be melted from the entrance. It slowly starts icing over again. That on top of having to face our fears, and learning just how strong our trust in the Force is... It's a lot."

He shook his head. "Seemed a lot harder the second time around. I was almost ready to give up. BeeDee saved me. I don't know where I'd be without him." A faint breeze filtered towards them, perhaps marking the threshold of the next chamber.

"He's my friend, after all."

The sound of a short inhale came from behind Cal, and the windchime clatter of Tony's waving hand as he prepared to say something glib, then evidently reconsidered. The second time should have been easier, when Cal's faith was such a physical thing. It didn't take Tony long to land instead on, "Losing him must have really..." with another tinkling wave, this time without the words for what might happen to anyone's faith after a tragedy like that. The idea was more alien to Tony than these VR halls.

"Losing...?" Cal started to ask, but he halted again, bringing a hand up to stop Tony although he wasn't quite sure how far the other was behind him so he might have ended up smacking him in the process.

He said nothing by way of explanation, but that was because the breeze had seemed abruptly cut off the moment they'd taken the next few steps. The light from before seemed a far presence, hidden by more shadowed obstructions. The heat had returned, settling over them like a physical thing.

"What is that...?" he wondered, frowning into the darkness between them and the light before glancing up...and freezing.

"Uh. Tony? Above us."

At a glance, the cavern ceiling above was dotted in glowing red, which seemed far too numerous until one grouping and then another moved, suggesting that clusters belonged to singular entities.

The gloom that Tony had hardly noticed seeping into their dark hall was just enough to make out the shadow of that gesture before he had to physically walk into it. He still took Cal's raised hand in response, drawing it down with an equally measured, slow exhale as he tracked a similar search across this new space, trying to get a sense of the proportions of it somehow between the shadows. Those calculations had to run in the background as Cal directed him upward, and after a beat, Tony could only really offer optimistically, "Red's a good colour. One of the best." The optimism was not nearly enough to make him eager to test these lights the same way he had the last ones; they just couldn't stand around waiting for the other one to make a move. Tony didn't have the patience for that. This time, he didn't take aim for the glow, but slowly lifted a hand toward the wall, keeping his focus on those red points while he tapped his ringing fingers against the stone lightly.

"Friendly advice if you ever see someone with a red saber? Don't engage."

Cal had to wonder if that applied to the above, the attention unsettling enough even without being able to actively sense any intent. He stood still, hand tightening around his weapon, eyes flicking over in the direction of the sound once Tony brought it in contact with the rocky surface. He looked up again just as the forms above them shifted almost in unison along with an echoing clatter, the red glowing brighter, enough to start faintly making out the individual shapes that contained each cluster of eyes.

Tony gave a small pout, ready to argue that red probably looked really cool, actually, until he managed to make out the shadow of too many legs to match those too many eyes, roiling to make that clattering noise. Right now, red was not making a good case for itself. They came roiling toward the vibration that Tony had sent singing through the wall, making him recoil, hands up tight to his chest with daintily spread fingers, grimacing at the impression of centipedes or cockroaches rushing toward him.

They crashed into each other, becoming a tight knot of chaos that was suddenly a pulsing, lurid glow with all of them trying to press into the same edge of the doorway. This close, in the intensity of the light, those eyes looked like they oozed, rubbery and distorting in the crush of the bodies. "Do you think they can come through the wall...?," Tony wondered, not well enough convinced of the security of that layer between them to lower his defensive hands. He only realized then that they seemed so perceptively wet because his skin was immediately slick with sweat in the crush of heat that rolled off of them.

The sound alone was enough to make Cal cringe, stepping back. "Don't know what good that's going to do if they're already in here," he pointed out. How many of them were there? And would the weapons they'd been granted actually work against them? It was a little disconcerting not to be very certain of either.

"Is it weird to think that they weren't actively hostile until now?" He paused. "...or is this not hostile yet?"

"They're..." Tony tried to answer, completely at a loss and ultimately landing on, "curious." It felt reasonable then that they might reflect some of his curiosity, after all, which was enough to bring Tony a little closer to where they seethed again, even with his pinkies still raised. Getting closer didn't make it any easier to discern where one creature ended and another began, though, and only made Tony squint in the light that they gave off. He raised a hand to give another experimental tap to the same stone, light as plucking a guitar string. It felt like the whole room heaved in response, Tony's mouth going dry in the stifling burst of heat, his squinting becoming rapid blinking that made the cracks that splintered through the stone appear like a low framerate render.

"Are they?"

Cal wasn't so sure, but the weight of the atmosphere was incredibly stifling then, making him gasp.

"...wh-what if...the blue light is encrypted data, and it gets pushed back whenever an external source attempts to access it. By these things...

"But continuous poking in an attempt to get to that data eventually triggers a harsher response. Like when it zapped BeeDee when he tried to scomp in and track the changes..."

A harsher response was a good way of getting attention. While Cal was putting it all together for himself, Tony muttered, "Way ahead of you," and didn't give him the chance to rationalize any further before Tony was hauling back to slam a heel into the splintering crack in the wall. It didn't quite go through, but the structure gave a groan of protest that ran through the floor under his still planted foot, and it was enough of a destabilization for whatever was seething underneath to burst through.

More light. More...bugs? Cal wasn't sure anymore, but he backed up all the same, grabbing Tony's shoulder to drag him back with him as the crack gave way.

The red-eyed things exploded into a frenzy, breaking whatever semblance of formation they had as they converged towards the rupture and the two intruders, some dropping down from the ceiling. The floor beneath their feet suddenly started rippling with seemingly abstract patterns, circuitry-like lines radiating briefly in the dimness.

"Was that part of the plan?" Cal not quite shouted as he contended with the growing noise that filled the space.

Tony went hopping back still on one foot as Cal tugged on him, not trusting how to put the other down as one of the invaders enveloped itself around it and gave Tony an immediate appreciation for just why they were wrapped in slippery armor. Its thousand legs scrabbled across the metal, leaving furrows in it where they dragged, the metal sheering off like embers crackling out of a fire and winking out of existence. Tony had to grab back at Cal blindly for balance so he could throw himself forward with driving force in his captured leg, stomping the bug under it, crushing it into the pool of more of them that had oozed out of the fissure onto the ground, blotting out those geometric patterns with their void-black bodies. "Always," Tony shouted back, then used his hold on Cal to shove him back down the hall, insisting, "Get out of here!" He'd think of a better plan when Cal was outside of the threat range, probably.

Were these the things they were supposed to get rid of? Cal windmilled his arms as he was shoved back, turning to do so, if only for a few steps before he looked back to make sure Tony was following. He splayed his hand out after them for a moment, only to remember that what he wanted to do probably wasn't going to translate into the system.

So instead he swung his blade at the skittering things that came closer, practically scraping the floor with its tip as he tried to clear them away from their feet.

Tony was definitely not following. He had instead gone stomping in the opposite direction, further into the chamber that they had hesitated at the entrance of, lifting his knees high both to bring them back down to crush whatever slithered under his feet, but also to make any progress at all as more of the bugs gushed out of the wall and flooded the floor, already up to his calves. That had to be a secondary problem for the moment, though, because Tony had to figure out what this gun did, hoping as he felt his way into holding it again that it was something spectacular. He spun back around, aiming with a steady snap for the hole in the wall that pulsed with glowing, squirming bugs, and pulled the trigger.

There was no recoil. It felt no different than a toy at an arcade cabinet, the trigger sliding back into place with the flaccid smoothness of plastic when Tony released it again along with his bracing breath, which sounded like it whistled in his ears, the bugs clawing up his knees a distant echo while he stared at the hole in betrayal. He had just enough time to flick his gaze toward Cal, and had barely considered the guilty dismay at this display of ineptitude before those darting lights running through the floor were suddenly surging. The mass where the bugs were still crawling remained a void, but it was still bright enough where it managed to peek through to make Tony squint, then flinch at the sound of crunching that hadn't come from under his boots. It came from the wall, where the hole at been and was now perfectly sealed, cleaving the bugs that hadn't quite made it through with surgical precision. When they fell on their backs and exposed their bellies full of slippery eyes, the red glow of them slowly dimmed.

Cal had thoroughly abandoned retreating, swinging his own weapon to slice at what might as well have been the floor for how distinct the crawling things were, on it. With no real indication of anything catching, other than vague movements as parts or something were flung, he had no idea if he was making any actual progress.

Smashing the things underfoot seemed to be slightly more productive, and yet not. The scrabbling against his armored legs was terribly distracting, so he missed the subtler sound that Tony had started to track then.

Since the gun didn't shoot, per se, Tony had continued to back up to get himself clear of the bugs, kicking them off of his legs and snatching a particularly ambitious one that climbed its way up to hurl it against the wall. That seemed to do the trick, too, shattering it into a waterfall of red eyeballs, like a dropped bag of marbles. It was when he swung around to grab another that he spotted Cal tapdancing around and said, "I thought I told you to go."

"I thought you hated bugs," Cal countered, even as he jerked his foot back, coming down on another skittering body in the process.

"The problem's here, where else should I be going?"

Tony didn't really have an answer for that, there was no rational expectation for what could be around the next corner, or even the last one, so he narrowed his eyes and hurled the next bug he caught against the wall to burst into a thousand glowing marbles. "I'm not taking them out to dinner here," he sniffed.

Cal caught a few more of the things with the flat of his blade, flinging them hard to join the one Tony had just exploded. That was...weird.

"Somewhere else then? Preferably with more lighting and elbow room."

"Somewhere else," Tony echoed, and had to ignore the siege of bugs scrambling wherever they could get purchase to quickly look around, trying to spot the most viable route for else between the glow of their eyes and the darting lights under the floor. He wasn't given much of a chance, several scorching bodies pressing up his hips and his back in the second he took to make his assessment, making his armor feel like a furnace until he could twist around and wrench them from his spine.

Suddenly Cal was there, wading through the things, hand swiping at the remaining ones that had attached themselves to Tony. He hurled them at the wall, drawing in a sharp breath at the heat.

"I can't use the Force in here- but... if this is a program then can't we... code something to help us?" He wasn't sure how that would work when they were plugged though, but then Tony did things without physical interfaces, didn't he?

"Is that not what we're doing right now?" Tony had to ask as his shoulders sagged with relief, head bowed slightly in thanks for freeing him from that torture. The furrows where claws had dragged across his armor were already smoothing over, back to perfect polish, but the heat was harder to recover from, lingering where all of his skin felt like it was sticking to the metal, swollen and sweating. "If I could handle this with a keyboard and a hot cup of coffee, trust me, I know which one I'd pick now, the one that doesn't involve murder cockroaches." He was looking around again, though, considering the proposal despite the arguing. If he was trying to hack is way to the problem, he'd have a code scanning the whole structure, looking for where it was hiding. "We could use a map," he mumbled.

"Not...really? Well I guess, we kind of are, but does that make us part of the code, or able to manipulate code? We were given this specific gear and weapons and were dumped in some very specific rendition of the program itself, but are we limited to that?"

Cal stayed near Tony, trying to keep the crawly critters off of them.

"Do we have access to a command menu or something? Or some other inventory other than a couple of weapons?" Or maybe asked the constantly swooning guy who was somewhere upstairs.

By the eighteenth question, Tony appeared to have forgotten about the bugs, or at least trusted Cal with them so he could watch Cal curiously, jaw tight. He had been so ready to trust that Cal could take care of himself, after his stories of adventuring on his own--happy to let him risk his neck in the woods. He was half way through composing a text to the Soldier, then to Gladio, before giving up on them both, sure there had to be a better way to ask them to keep a closer eye on the kid without them taking it personally, but it wasn't coming to him under these circumstances. Jon would have understood what he meant. Out loud, he was muttering, "Yeah, sure, let me--I'll figure that out," and casting around, finally remembering the bugs enough to kick some of them aside and reveal more of the floor for assessment. Maybe the gun worked both ways. He aimed down at the darting lights, and fired his mystery shot.

Cal could take care of himself very well in the real world, but this wasn't. It was something created and most of the threats were only visibly and audibly present, the scenery but programmed barriers. They lacked substance other than the slight stimulation of touch whenever he grabbed something or struck it with a blade that he could feel no weight of. It wasn't just feeling like he was Force-blind, it was like only half of his senses were operational. He wasn't used to purely operating by sight in such instances, not when he'd been taught to rely on so much more.

This seemed more like Tony's domain. He was the one who knew machines and computers inside and out. Cal thought he'd know what they were doing, how they were dealing with this bug problem. That it looked like they were expected to physically deal with them was a bit baffling to him, and while they were in a virtual realm, he was still thinking very much in terms of real world properties and the limitations of a metal blade as opposed to a lightsaber.

At least it was somewhat effective in that it could cleave through bugs, but it was hardly efficient when there were literal hordes of them. Cal kept swinging, trying to keep their space clear. Tony's words weren't exactly reassuring, but if nothing else, the Jedi knew him to be a man of his word. Which was why he didn't question him when he saw the flash of the gun as he fired again.

RATtrap

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