revivalproject | [ video ]

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[ Unlike the last time Jon has appeared on this network, this time it's very intentional. And it's very obvious that it is intentional. Apparently he has found himself a usable desk (presumably in the hospital) and has taken the time to prop up his phone appropriately to address his fellow involuntary inhabitants of this lovely place.

It's also rather obvious that he has been using this desk for a few days now at least. There is a comparably neat stack of paper in front of him, two or three notebooks, an assortment of pens, two different types of tape recorders along with some tapes and an empty mug all rather present and no, he doesn't really care about the slight mess. He himself looks a little messy himself, though that's just his normal state of being perpetually tired. But... There are more important things right now, right? Like... How to even start. ]

Uhh... Good evening.

[ That's just remotely awkward. But okay. ]

I have- I mean. I already spoke to a few of you. Either through this network or at an actual encounter in person and... I suppose you might have noticed me at that little welcome home party the Agrii have set up, but... Let's not talk about that. That was... Dreadful.

[ He pauses a moment to sort his thoughts, then goes on. ]

To those I haven't met yet: Hello. I'm Jonathan Sims and I have agreed to help with the hospital.

[ Here he makes a short gesture with one hand to indicate his surroundings. He is indeed at the hospital. Maybe that's your clue to avoid needing medical help anytime soon?

He drops that hand back down. ]

Further, I have decided to take on the task of turning what is left of what appears to have been a library once back into an actual library. To be more precise: I plan to make recordings along with written pieces and store them there once the place is cleaned up. These may serve for our own reference, but also for the Agrii if they are so inclined. My hope is that by teaching them about ourselves, our worlds and our language, we can achieve a more successful way of communicating with them. Learn to understand what they want and need and- You get the idea.

Now what I need is to find a suitable format to record on. While I work with magnetic tapes a lot myself for certain reasons, I am not unfamiliar with digital recordings. Also I am well aware that some of you come from worlds that are technically far more advanced than my Earth happens to be, so I... I would be interested to know if there are more practical formats available. Preferably ones that allow for video as well as audio recordings and don't necessarily require additional hardware for playback. Your universe's version of the data points to be found across this city, for example, just possibly without that direct access to a person's mind. Given that we may soon have access to a functioning replicator... It should be possible.

[ He lets that hang there, then takes a moment to try and think what else he might have to add. He ends up with a short shrug and half a sigh. ]

I guess that's it. If you have a suggestion you believe might work, I would very much like to hear it. And before you ask: Yes, I am planning to keep a purely digital library along with a physically accessible one.

Thank you.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ Oh no. That guy. See that slight eye roll and the barely disguised, yet inaudible groan. Just his luck, right?

But!

Fine. ]

Presumably somewhere out of our reach. I may not be as technically versed as others, but I do understand the concept of servers. And I would rather not try and store an entire library on this network.

Which, again, would be purely digital. I want these records to also be easily accessible to people who have never even heard of an online search engine.

If we can find it, though, then we'd already have the hardware. Or, we already do-- there's a bunch of broken data points all over that library place. Can't be too hard to reverse engineer, we've got all the pieces.

I'll need an office, of course. [Okay, maybe a little screwing around.]

I'm no engineer, I'm an archivist. If you believe you can recreate the Agrii's technology, then by all means- But hold on a moment.

[ He squints a little at his phone, fingers tapping the paper in front of him. ]

Weren't you going to build some sort of ship the last time we spoke? To leave this place and be gone?

That was a different life, Jonboy. We're on Agra 10 now, keep up. Did you want a ship instead? I can multitask.

No. I need my assistants to be reliable and capable of finishing a task without either being distracted or being a distraction themselves.

[ Yeaaaaaah, right. ]

And, please, don't call me that.

I can't help how distracting I am, that's a you problem, but you're welcome. Don't you worry, sourpuss, I haven't met a task that I would deny the pleasure of thoroughly handling. Do you really think I'm incapable of achieving space flight and reconstituting advanced alien technology to accept new data inputs at once? Please. Basically the same problem. [He's already on the move, clearly, heading for the library to assess the damage strewn about. Hey, this was the ideal place for kindling, anyway, he could have a forge by the end of the day. Jon didn't have to know his methods.]

But apparently you can't handle being serious.

[ You know, it's almost nice to be able to be openly dismissive and doubtful towards something again. ]

Maybe once you deliver actual proof for all your claims I might be more willing to believe you. But as it stands you offer little more than empty words and insufferable nicknames.

Hey, okay, we're not playing like that. You haven't delivered proof that anyone should trust you to be their nurse or their librarian, but no one's up your ass about it. You're the one asking for help, and now you're coming at me with this energy. Were you hoping to hear from someone else? Call them out like an adult, then.

Oh, please. You keep calling me names and expect me to take you serious, Mister Tony, Looking for: just some fun, nothing serious?

[ Make a note here that he's directly quoting Tony's first appearance on the network from about two weeks ago. Without having to look it up. Jon may default to being polite, but if you prod him enough, he bites. Pair that with the fact that he's still lacking an adequate source of food and... Well. Hunger can make people even more cranky than they normally are. ]

But by all means. I will gladly leave any medical emergencies in your capable hands! Just find the medical data point and touch it. It won't teach you any basic anatomy lessons, but the rest is just lovely.

[ He's way happier with attempting to teach the Agrii proper grammar... ]

Hey, archivist, do you process information or just record it? Try playing that one back one more time for me, because I didn't say I wanted to be the meat-mechanic. Are you looking for a fight?

[ And he lets out a slow, sharp exhale in response. At least that's a name he can't exactly take offense in. And to his credit, he does make an attempt to calm down. ]

I am looking to get something done.

[ He leans back where he sits, looks up at the ceiling and then back to his phone. The scowl doesn't ever leave his face, though. ]

I'm sorry. Yes, I am looking for help, but I really don't like that attitude.

Which one? The one where I offer to help and you're an asshole to me for no reason? That's no way to run a company, boss.

[ He will have to deal with this now, will he?

But maybe he really shouldn't be surprised and just give in to frustration right away. So yeah. Here's a bit of a groan at the latest nickname. ]

It's a library, not a company. It's...

Fine.

Fine! If you believe yourself to be able to recreate the Agrii's data storage technology I will head over and meet you there. And we can talk.

[ And he will likely come out of it with a few more grey hairs. ]

"You called me an assistant..." How was a library not a company? Tony frowned at his camera, feeling like Jon was committed to making everything an unnecessary argument and if Tony let Jon goad him into it, they would be on this call forever. They could argue semantics when they both had something to do with their hands. Instead, Tony dismissed, "Great, it's a date," and signed off to tuck the tablet away before Jon could tell him exactly how Tony had pissed him off now. Immediate regret. This Hulk had been fun to tease on camera, but Tony didn't know what to expect from him in person. Maybe he should have put him off, done more remote testing...

Tony already stood in the plaza of the library compound, glancing between the two buildings, realizing this might have been a bigger task than he had conceptualized. There were broken spheres dotted along the overgrown lawn, but they had clearly come from inside these structures at some point, and cobbling together what pieces they would need without entirely cannibalizing a working data point, like the one by the fountain, was going to take some clean up effort. Now Tony had two problems. He let out a long, slow breath, deliberating calling for some assistance of his own, but he hadn't earned that kind of favour here yet. He swept into the weedy grass, bent and searching for the largest fragment he could pick up first with the sleeves of his sweater pulled over his hands. He weighed the bowl of the sphere he found carefully in his hands while squinting up at the buildings again. It could have come from that window there, maybe, the trajectory could make sense.

And Jon would have liked little more than to snarl back at that final message, but the connection is cut before he ever gets a chance. So cursing a little under his breath he picks up a box of items and makes his way over from the hospital to the neighboring buildings that make up the library and what appears to have been some sort of teaching facility.

The Archivist certainly doesn't strike a particularly imposing figure as he rounds the corner with his container in his arms, scowl set in place and only pausing for half a moment to observe Tony picking up... Well. Something from the ground. Right. Probably one of those broken spheres. The entire building was littered with these nasty little shards when he first went inside.

Stepping closer, he lets his attention drift over to the actual building in question. Its entrance and the distinct lack of any written signs or markings to actually declare it as what it once used to be. The utter lack of any sort of written language from the Agrii still leaves him to wonder.

"There is an entire pile of those swept together inside." Jon finally points out in Tony's direction, having stopped short from actually turning to enter the library itself "And no, not a single one of them is even remotely intact."

Oh, he's much smaller than Tony anticipated. Right, one problem suspended for the time being; Tony would worry about buying that bridge if Mr. Hyde actually came out of Jon as any kind of threat. "Have you scoped the place out?" he asked, gesturing up at the height of the compound, hoping one of them knew a bit of what to expect in there, then. Tony hadn't been in town nearly long enough to do a deep dive into anywhere but the place he might have accused to being a pharmacy, generously, that he had bunked down in. If he was going to be spending his time here now, looking for treasure, he was going to have to move his stuff. "Is it just these, or...?" Tony continued as he followed Jon toward the library, holding up the piece of glass that Tony really hoped wasn't all the data points were made out of. He could do a lot with a little, but he hadn't made a storage system out of hot sand yet.

"I was inside a few times, yes." Jon confirms as they enter the building. Luckily there aren't any steps outside. Climbing the ridiculously high stairs that seem the norm for the Agrii always feels a little awkward to him.

Once inside what appears to be an entry hall, Jon nods to a path leading down a hallway to their left "I was planning to close off the non-essential areas for now and use whatever can be used from there to fix the main part of the building. Fortunately there aren't many windows in the original library as I doubt replacing those will be doable." His plan for those entails to simply seal them off with a door panel or something.

He moves on ahead and through a large, broken set of double doors that leads into the main library, which presents itself as one massive room with shelves lining the walls over three levels. On each end of the room sits a broken elevator, once used to reach to upper levels and the rather vast center of the room is occupied by a massive pile of rubble and broken shelves. It rather looks as if several layers of floor have plain crashed down from above and Jon can't help but wince a little every time he sees the mess. It will be horrendous to clear all that out.

But for now, he simply nods up, indicating the various levels and empty space above them "I assume they had actual floors constructed to float on the different levels. Not a construction meant to last over being abandoned for centuries, of course."

And with a small shrug of resignation, Jon turns sharply to the right and heads over to a small table where he sets down the box he has brought along if only to not having to carry it any longer, then points in the opposite direction "All the broken spheres from down here I swept together back there. Of course there are more on the upper levels. But getting there is tedious." As in it requires to climb some of those stair cases originally build for presumably long Agrii legs.

The entry hall captured Tony's attention for a moment, making him linger as Jon's footsteps echoed back down to him through the crumbling hall. A structural pillar, sturdy and stone, jutted up to the ceiling, dark high above them. That was a chimney. It wasn't obvious from here where the other halls led, but Jon had casually tossed out closing them off, and Tony didn't know why that would be worth mentioning unless there was something to worry about behind those doors. He followed quickly then, throwing a curious glance over his shoulder at the dark doorways.

"Yeah, this floating thing..." he murmured, just in time to catch the end of Jon's hypothesis and stopping abruptly, surprised by the mountain of tedium they faced. At least Tony could use that junk. "I was hoping it was jut an aesthetic choice," he finished, mostly to himself. The orbs floated, too, and so far Tony hadn't come up with a reasonable theory for that one contributing to the data points' functionality. Where they kept information also floating...well, it was certainly a new data point. That had to be helpful somehow. "Why do you want to close off the rest of the building?" Tony finally asked, following still despite the very clear indication of where Jon meant him to go, to peek at the box now.

There isn't much of interest in the box. Some mostly empty notebooks, pens, Jon's tape recorder and the book Cayde had given him earlier that day. He only plans to leave some of those items at the library, however.

"Huh?" The question earns Tony a perplexed look that shifts from him away to the way they came from and is concluded with a short shrug.

"Pragmatism. We currently don't have use for that much space. If we sacrifice some of the space we have, we can use materials from that part of the building to properly fix the rest - At the very least I would like to make sure the regular weather as well as the energy storms can't cause further damage to the structure and whatever is inside. Should we manage to store knowledge in here, I would rather not have it suffer the same fate as the spheres that used to sit here." He doesn't even want to think about all that lost knowledge. It puts a knot into his stomach.

He shifts his attention back to Tony "I'm not thinking of demolishing it entirely. Christ, we may not even be able to tear down any of the buildings here. At the same time we can't try to fix everything at once either. I believe that makes sense?"

It was a relief that Jon didn't have a harrowing tale of meeting some monster in the bowels of the library, but his concerns about the natural disasters didn't add up to Tony. He hadn't witnessed one of the energy storms himself yet, to be fair, but he still slowly juggled the fragment of an orb between his hands thoughtfully. It wasn't a storm that had done this to it. Those other data points outside had been fully exposed to those elements for...who knew how long? The data point had suggested centuries, but that wasn't what the state of some of these buildings suggested. A much shorter time frame, or much less destructive storms than they had been told, had been chipping away at this library. "Sure," Tony still agreed, craning his neck to assess what they were working with in this hall again, trying to recreate a crime scene. "Yeah, makes sense, you like to take things on one at a time, I hear you. Do you think the weather did this?" Tony held up his fragment to bring Jon on board for this theory. "Not too many windows, you said it yourself. And they're all over the lawn, like they cheated on their girlfriend. Doesn't that feel a little bit intentional to you?" Now Tony backed away, to investigate the pile of broken orbs that Jon had indicated. "I bet you not one of these is intact. Those ones outside, what do we know about them? One, they weren't made for to Agrii. Two, wherever they came from, the Agrii know that they can survive the storm, they're trusting that technology." Nothing else here reaped the rewards of that technology, though. Just those alluring orbs.

"None of these are intact. I checked them when I gathered the pieces." Jon confirms, but his tone is more pensive now as he himself stands in front of the now empty shelves. These also lack any sort of labeling. Though that's not exactly what he is dwelling on. It's Tony's words and the possible train of thought they stem from.

The train of thought they set his own mind on - Again. It's not really one he enjoys.

"I... I want it to be the weather. Those storms. Something we can research and explain with science." Though when was the last time he has been this lucky...? Of course he has had his thoughts on what else might be involved, but those aren't thoughts he likes to acknowledge.

So he just exhales and mentally moves past them. and instead decides to prompt the other man without attempting to outright compel him "You sound as if you doubt that to be the case."

Tony snorted, spinning to flash Jon a raised eyebrow for that accusation. "Do you think this place is haunted?" He hadn't meant to imply they were dealing with an unscientific poltergeist here, although they couldn't entirely rule it out. He had seen the dead walking already on this journey. Tony waved that possibility away (whatever happened, the supernatural was always plan Z), and tossed the fragment he carried gently to test its balance as he caught it, before slashing it to the floor, shattering it with the rest. Pointing to the science he just did, Tony proposed, "This mess was man-made." That was the simplest answer. The implications were far more daunting than the will of the wind, though. "And if someone did this, I'd want to know why. If it was the Agrii, what are they hiding from us, why are they curating what we're supposed to know if we're supposed to all be on the same side? If it wasn't...someone here doesn't want us to know something. Either way, this was a lot of work." Tony looked up, through the maw of empty space above them. He didn't know all of the Lost Boys yet, he didn't have a suspect, but if someone was willing to put in this much effort to hide something, Jon and Tony trying to piece it back together would have to be a threat that was easy to crush.

It was still just a hypothesis. Looking around the room now for something to help him start sorting, Tony prompted, "Alternative theories?" If Jon thought it was the weather, or ghosts, Tony was open to exploring the evidence. There was a bin not unlike the chaotic collection cart Tony had found himself swimming in more than once at Barker in the middle of the night before a due date, overturned near the desk Jon had claimed and only a little full of some mildew that had taken hold in the dirt collected along the bottom of it. Tony crouched to sweep it out as best as he could with his sleeve before turning it upright and sliding it closer to their rubble monster. Time to dig in.

"Well, you certainly made that particular mess." Jon comments dryly, but then sighs, shoulders slumping a little "And I want to think of us having to deal with the fallout of some... Alien war. That's just..."

Terrifying, yes.

"And the Agrii seem... Well. They genuinely seem to try? I- I told as much to T'Pring. Maybe her people can find something. Or get in contact with them." Which is a shallow hope at best. And Jon hates having to rely on hope without knowing anything at all "For now the storms remain our main concern, however. Since the chances of us having to face one again are rather high and we know by now they mess with technology as well as abilities of the genetic and supernatural sort at least. They can mess all of us up if we aren't careful. Personally I very much would prefer them to have a supernatural origin, if I am being honest. And I am not speaking of ghosts."

But supernatural is something he can understand. Even more so these days than a few years ago. Scientific facts are still something he favors above anything else, but when those fails and the entire world suddenly seems wrong, then it's good to at least be able to handle said wrongness.

Vaguely picking up on Tony doing something on the other side of the pile, Jon slowly wanders back around as he speaks, tipping his head slightly "Ah- Yes. I was going to see if I can find something that might work as a tool. Though we may have to improvise here." Or maybe ask a Force user for help.

"I can use most of this," Tony muttered, dragging a chunk of crumbling stone out of the pile to drop heavily into his bin. "It'll need to be sorted." Most of the good shit would have found its way to the bottom of the pile by now, but the structural pieces could be repurposed, too. He was going to need somewhere to work, suited to his unique needs, and whatever they would need to start sealing off the library like Jon wanted would be in this rubble.

Tony had no experience with these storms thus far, and wasn't keen on hearing about Jon's experiences with magical forces just yet, so while he shopped he asked, "Do you already have a record of how the storms effect people?" Jon already had some details, obviously; the effects were technological, genetic, and supernatural. "Is there a commonality in the onset of the...mess up?" Someone really had to start defining what was happening to them better. "Like, did everyone experiencing the effects drink the rainwater or whatever?" Obviously, it wasn't going to be that easy, but if they could determine how the system was getting infected, they were better equipped to build the right kind of walls to weather the next storm. "I mean, where is everyone living? Is anywhere safe when it hits?" Tony finally straightened from hauling junk out of the pile, making it groan and and shift its weight, taking a deep breath and pushing his sleeves up and waiting at least one second before producing another question.

At this, Jon gives Tony a perplexed look "Use it?" It's just rubble, isn't it? Sure, you could probably stack it or something, but... He tilts his head and looks at the mess before picking up a random piece of it "What are we sorting it by?"

But his attention is drawn away from his piece of rubble at the row of questions and the Archivist grimaces a little.

"There was a bit of a discussion on it at the meeting the Agrii arranged." Jon replies, then sighs "All we did was exchange what little information we have. It's not exactly a lot and I myself haven't been here long either. A week, maybe, before they send us to Risa. And most of that week I was lost in one of those storms that had been going even before I was pulled here. It didn't reach the city. But I... I couldn't get out either."

And by all means he should have been able to find his way out. He found his way out of the Buried - A place that existed outside of reality.

"I suppose how it affects us depends on what we are - And what we can do. The robots worry me. Getting a tape recorder to function again is one matter, but an Exo..." He dreads that day. Not only because he doesn't want to be responsible for rebooting Cayde. He may look terrifying, but... In a way the Exo is a friend?

[Video]

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I liiiive. Sorry.

It's all good! <3

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