revivalproject

Entry tags:

Outage

WHO: Tony and fellow 10s exclusively.
WHERE: Heading to the power plant, open to suggestions
WHAT: Tony gets into the civil engineering game, for his own purposes. He has disrupted the grid. Sorry.
WHEN: Now? Whenever you're ready?
WARNINGS: Thread is horny.
SOME NOTES: This is a blackout that I didn't really intend to last very long, but that's up to you. If you want to use it to do some power outage shenanigans, let me and/or Hux know and we'll stay distracted from fixing the problem.

network
[Shortly after all of the power seems to cut abruptly, whether or not anyone noticed or were peacefully asleep in the dark, absolutely everyone receives a direct, private text message at the same time.]
I will fix it. Not a problem.

problem solving
It was inevitable that this would become a problem, but Tony didn't anticipate it happening this fast. There was a whole city out there that, presumably, had been run on this very same grid when fully populated. How was he supposed to know that the entire alien power load was only built to anticipate a single Gamecube and a dinky water display? D.A.T.A. was still smoking in the dark from the surge when Tony wandered dejectedly back into the workshop, no luck fixing the outage locally-- this wasn't a fuse problem. It was everyone's problem.

At least one thing was obviously not part of the same grid; the network hadn't gone down for Tony, and while that was further bad news in the long run, he could take the blessing to try to address the issue before anyone got hysterical about it. He sent out the mass text as he tore the data spheres down from their suspension and meticulously worked in the low light from the simmering forge to feel for the heat and melted warp, and gut the most damaged pieces, leaving them spread blindly on the workbench. That was really going to fuck up his schedule.

He knew where the power plant was, kind of, in theory, and it wasn't a trek he was eager to take without the full light of day on his side, but it wasn't like he was getting anything else done here. It would be faster than it looked, he could run, there was probably a generator up there and the way was going to be brightly lit and not an dark, creepy forest at all. Deep breath. Tony grabbed his jacket and his tool belt and started across town.

Elsewhere, the hum of power had gone silent, lights winked out, and the steady bubbling of the fountain at the centre of the city murmured to a stop, until the surface of the water was still as glass.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The praise was quickly forgotten, Tony was more than used to no one taking him up on that signal. Instead, he asked with a lip raised in disbelief, "You don't know how to pick a lock?" That one, at least, wasn't an assumption about Cayde's unique composition. Tony didn't know much about the ships himself, discouraged from bothering with them early, but Cayde struck him as the kind of guy who knew how to hotwire a car. If not, he had really mastered an unearned swagger. The distance was a much better argument against that tactic, anyway, and Tony raised his eyebrows in appreciation for the much better suggestion. Of course, a torch, he had been the one espousing the virtues of going native last time they had talked, that meant going analog in the absence of civility. And he had already made a handful of matches on him that he supposed he could spare one of, if they were desperate. "Did you manage to make any alcohol yet?" he asked, sounding slightly bewildered by the obvious simplicity of the solution.

The darkness didn't do much to hide at least the suggestion of the scowl, evident mostly from the squint of his eyes. "You try picking an airlock. Incidentally, I did give it a shot but I didn't want to blunt my knife. Either they've got magical passwords or the Agrii just keep 'em there for show. I guess I can't be too surprised that they wouldn't let anyone have such easy access- wouldn't want their 'He Rows' to go runnin' off on them."

At least Tony wasn't dismissing his torch suggestion. "Haven't gotten the chance to do much aside from start clearing out a spot. But I do still have some of that stuff they had at the party, back at my place."

He jerked his head towards the main road leading to the southwestern end of the city. "Kind of out of the way from the power plant but it's in the same quadrant at least."

The problem of the mysteriously locked ships was going to have to be one for another night, but Tony was clearly already considering the possible problems Cayde had found himself encountering as he explained the attempt, combing his beard thoughtfully. Cayde hadn't suggested he tried getting in any way other than the doors.

"Excellent," he grinned at the solution to their fuel needs, and waved for Cayde to lead the way; they could find a sturdy stick and a rag to finish their puzzle on the walk, the whole place was made up of that kind of garbage. "And does the sommelier recommend the red or the white for this evening?"

Normally getting into a locked ship wouldn't be a problem. Of course, it helped immensely to have a Ghost, and barring that, an idea of where the panels that were supposed to come off to get around the wirework. That wasn't to say that Cayde had given up on getting into a ship. It was a side-project. He had side-projects on top of side-projects. ...anyway, sooner or later he'd find a ship that was cooperative to his coaxing. He figured trying to blow one open would be counterproductive.

Flashing a crooked, amber-lit grin, the Exo turned and started along. "Oh, I definitely recommend the red vintage. Guaranteed to light more than a few fires, practically comes off the vine kicking." He wasn't kidding, either, having watched the green kid get sloshed from popping a few of the fruits he figured the stuff was made from, back at the Agrii's attempt at a welcome home bash.

"Glownies'd come in handy now. You get anywhere with Llamrei?" he idly asked as they headed down the road. Eventually he'd point towards the lone clocktower overlooking the lake. "Ah, there we are."

The glownies were something of a sore spot, if Tony's sigh meant anything, but he waved off the question with a casual shrug. "I kind of passed of the project to a professional. It's going to take way longer than I thought it would. Computers are way easier to program." He may or may not have acquired a few more bruises than he was happy with nursing along the way.

That glowing endorsement of Cayde's samples had brought Tony back around to a question that had kept him up at night since Cayde had offered to share a drink. It was only one question in a system of many, but it was a truly baffling one considering any of the theories Tony had managed to cobble together; "Can you get drunk?" He was not going to let Cayde brush that one off, it was far too intriguing, even after he presented the most dramatic possible claim to call a place of his own. Tony tipped his head back to take it all in, then cocked it to the side to shoot Cayde a look that was equal part judgemental and appreciative.

Fair enough. Cayde only shrugged in response as Tony admitted the fate of his glownie wrangling attempts. It had been a good idea, but given neither of them was exactly an expert in the behavioral tendencies of such creatures, the Exo wasn't about to rub it in. "Sparrows are still the way to go." Maybe they could cobble together some parts for one.

The question was bound to come up at some point, and with it being voiced then, Cayde glanced over at Tony with half a laugh. "Not on this stuff, anyway," he admitted. "I don't think I'd recommend anything made for an Exo to get at least a little buzzed to be consumed by a human though."

That was something of a relief. There was no way Tony could work the effects of a stiff drink into his working theory of Exo structural systems, but even the idea that there was something that could have that kind of effect on Cayde's processing was excruciatingly fascinating. He was going to kill Tony before he gave him a peek under the hood. "Were you cut off from Yggdrasil, too, when everything...happened?" he asked, finding he didn't have enough context for what happened to Earth in Cayde's dimension to properly form that kind of question, and stumbling with that problem for a beat before he remembered what he had been trying to tell Cayde. He could help Tony out if he wanted to. "The Asgardians gave us that kind of warning, too-- every one of them is the size of three dudes, solid muscle, beer in their bottles as soon as they're born. The kind of shit they made for their tolerance could strip the paint off a car from twenty meters. Cap liked it, though. You should see what you can put him through."

The specifics were unfortunately things that Cayde didn't really care to consider, satisfied with the fact that he could still go to a bar, have a drink and maybe play a few rounds of poker.

"Yggdrasil? That's...what, Norse? What's that got to do with anything?" He wasn't quite sure where Tony was going with that, but as he led the way into the old clocktower, he at least got to piece together that they were still somewhere along the lines of drinks, and these Asgardians weren't your average Vikings.

"References only work when everyone understands them. Who's Cap? Oh, watch your step. Structure's sturdy but we got a few flights of stairs on up. Also, don't lean too much on the rail on the account that it doesn't exist in a lot of parts."

Tony only hesitated briefly at the foot of the stairs, not sure he entirely trusted Cayde's read on the structural integrity, but was quick to bounce up after him as long as Cayde's weight wasn't enough to send the whole thing into the foundations. "You haven't met him either? God, this place is a dump. Captain America, there's two of them here and it's honestly blowing my mind because he can't fart back home without ten people fawning over it. Do you even know who Captain America is?" Hockey, Tony could forgive, that was meaningless roughhousing. Letting the legend of Captain America die with the rest of the world, beyond the pale.

"Watch this one here," Cayde warned, giving a light nudge with his foot to the broken step just above the one he stood on before he leaned into skipping it and mounting the one after.

"Can't say I have. Are...there supposed to be two of them? Also, Captain America? Really? What, is there like, a Captain Canada too?"

Finally the stairs leveled out to the top floor of the tower, the faint light from outside creeping through a broken section of wall that made for a rustic sort of window providing something of a glimpse of the rest of the city, or at least what could be seen of it. Ancient gears of assorted sizes and shapes overtook the opposite wall, rusted over and likely jammed in place for the years it had sat unmaintained. Cayde walked over to a makeshift shelf lined with a few bottles, some of red liquid, others empty. He plucked one of the former off the shelf, holding it out. "Here we are."

Tony was going to have to come back here to do some repairs before he found Cayde stuck in the staircase one day. That could have been a useful vulnerable position, though. Power plant first, ship locks second, Cayde's theatrical clock tower death trap eventually. The clockwork at the top of the tower captured Tony's attention first, causing him to drift over to them and give a curious nudge to a particularly worn through looking one with a single finger, testing the resistance. These were practically fused together.

These reactions to Cap's aesthetic were really challenging Tony's worldview, and he was feeling less confident about defending it. It was pretty ridiculous, the way Cayde put it. The best Tony had was to correct, "Captain Britain, actually. All of the Canadian guys are pretty snow-forward, they don't do patriotism like that." As far as Tony knew, anyway. Trudeau had never offered to introduce him to Captain Anything, and Tony didn't spend their time together asking. "And there is supposed to be one of them, but this experience wasn't designed to be...kind." Tony heaved a sigh and was glad to switch gears to take the bottle from Cayde and hold it up to the light, then give an experimental sniff. "This is juice," he complained. How were they supposed to commit arson with that?

Like as the extra exposure to the elements hadn't helped for the network of gears. The clocktower was drafty, but that didn't bother Cayde. Besides, he liked being able to have a good view of things. A Hunter's roost.

"Britain? How about that." It wasn't a dismissal, as the Exo was mulling these things over. He considered what Tony mentioned of Captain America earlier, and what he said now to confirm that only one in the singular form should exist. That just brought all sorts of weird to the table here, not that it wasn't already so. "So what all these captains do back home?"

He snorted a laugh as Tony judged the beverage. "It probably is, if the fruit was anything to go by. Take a sip." He'd seen Jon only work at a glass, not that he figured the man had a very high constitution for alcohol, but observation of others at the party between drinks and the fruit it appeared to come from suggested that it was potent stuff.

Tony gave an unsteady, "U-uh..." at the suggestion, wrist going limp to droop the bottle with dejection further away from his face. He hadn't wanted to suggest so early on in its development that he wasn't going to be a regular guest of Cayde's speakeasy; getting Cayde to tolerate him at all seemed lucky enough. He had never had the luxury of preparing an excuse for not having a drink, though. His addiction was public domain at home. "Can't," he had to admit. Even if it was just fruit juice, that was a risky gamble. "My name's Tony, and I'm an alcoholic," he said as he handed the bottle back for Cayde to take the test for them, then hastily turned to find something else to do with his attention. Oh look, what else was on this shelf? "The good captains," he explained, glad to have something to move quickly to, "mostly punch Nazis, mad scientists and dragons threatening the life and liberty of their nations. They're the type to put on a big speech before they do it, you know, comes with the rank, I think."

The look he was given suggested a 'Really?' before a more accepting shrug. Cayde could understand that. Anyway, Tony clearly had a job to get to and going there even half tipsy probably wouldn't look good on record.

There wasn't a whole lot on the shelf aside from the bottles. A roll of paper sat snug in one corner, and a pencil that looked like someone had chewed the end off to expose the lead- or at least taken an obscenely huge knife to sharpen it, as was the case. There's the ramen bowl souvenir he'd gotten from Risa, except it was currently holding a bunch of bullets.

As Tony distracted himself with explanations on the captains, Cayde pulled one of the bottles from the shelves. It had a rag stuffed in the top, which he removed, flashing the man a guilty sort of smile. "Never know when you might need a different kind of cocktail," is all he says, but he put the bottle back, keeping the rag. Now they just needed a stick or something.

"Oh I know someone like that. Quite a few someones, in fact. Are they all about inspiring words and that sorta thing?"

As intriguing as the paper was, Tony wasn't quite nosy enough to unroll it in front of Cayde, occupying his hands with an idle swirl of a finger through the bullet bowl that couldn't have been good for the otherwise impeccable feng shui of the room. None of them looked entirely compatible with Cayde's ever present sidearm, but it wasn't a model Tony was particularly familiar with. The rag was an excellent contribution to their project, and Tony responded to Cayde's guilty smile with a bright one of his own, not one to snitch on anyone for blowing something up if it was in their way.

To the idea of inspiring words, Tony rolled his eyes to the ceiling and grumbled, "It's exhausting. The rest of the team loves it, but it never fails to have the opposite effect on me, like, great, I do feel like all hope is lost, you don't have to put me on blast. Come on, I feel like an owl is going to peck out my eyes up here." He gestured for Cayde to lead the way again down the stairs to follow his practiced step.

While Cayde was satisfied he'd gotten bullets at all, he was anxious about whether they'd actually fire as opposed to jamming up his precious Ace of Spades. Or, you know, might blow up in his face. He had more faith in his hand cannon than the bullets in that case.

"Right?? Although in my case it's more 'okay, yeah, I know we're going up against all the odds blah blah, but I don't need a pep talk when I can let my gun do the talking.'"

He laughed, starting on down at Tony's insistence. "An owl would be a nice change of pace. Or chickens. Chickens are nice. I don't think the Agrii were big on farming."

"The worst part," Tony continued as he picked his way back down the stairs, "is that, even if they can't deliver on all of those promises and we get totally wiped and everyone should feel like a dickhead, them most of all, it's like suddenly everyone else doubles down for them. Of course it sucks that the big plan didn't work, but can't you see he feels bad about it? Isn't he a dreamboat? Please." Maybe that was more of a personal problem. Tony felt bad about it every time he fucked up, too, but the most support anyone ever had for him was to make sure he didn't forget about it, like that could ever happen. He was sure he was going to be reminded of the power outage at least once an interaction for the next month, and it wouldn't be to assure him he was going to get it right the next time. There would have been a block party by now if Steve had stumbled over the giant outlet in the centre of town.

Was Tony going about this wrong?

He froze just outside the door to the clock tower, the image of a street party mingling unpleasantly with a flock of chickens, and wrinkled his nose. "Why chickens?" That was so specific.

Yeah, that did sound like a personal problem, but Cayde nodded in sympathy. "Some people just seem to have it all. Now if it were me? One, I wouldn't be caught dead making some grand speech, two, no one would listen to my plan anyway, and three- well, it doesn't matter much because if it succeeds then all the credit goes to the Guardian I do manage to get to go with my plan, and if it doesn't, then it's a never-ending chorus of I-Told-You-So's."

He stopped a few steps after hearing those behind him had paused, and he glanced back at Tony. The question almost made him laugh. Was that really what had thrown him? He supposed a robot man talking about chickens was a little strange, sure.

"Eh, I just miss the chicken I brought home from the Farm, I guess," he admitted, shrugging. "She's a sassy little thing. Helped me get some kills in by distracting Cabal. I named her Colonel." He was so proud of that chicken.

Obviously, Tony should have guessed that the tin man had a fowl companion he rode into battle with, it was the future, anything was possible. Catching up to follow again, Tony asked, "You brought a chicken to a gun fight?" He was starting to see why Cayde's plans maybe didn't go over well with a crew; between this and the molotov, it was sounding like his ancestry had closer cultural ties to Florida than Canada like Tony had suspected.

Handed more titles to wonder about, Tony had to ask, "What do you mean, guardian? Are you actually a really advanced roomba, should someone have been looking out for you? Are you a kid?" That would explain some things. "Sorry, you're just...tall." Was Tony hitting on a kid? Panic.

"Don't be silly," Cayde snorted. "It was a stealth mission. Like I said, she distracted, I knifed them in the back. Good times."

Once Tony started to follow along again, Cayde continued, figuring heading down and around the flood plain would be better than cutting directly west when they were still in the dark. More streets, more buildings, less of a chance of stepping into the muck. He kept his eyes out for a stick or something to use as a torch base in the meantime.

"Guardians- we're the ones that got brought back, either blessed or cursed to keep going so long as we got our Light." He waved off an impending question, pausing only to shoot Tony a look as he started rambling about the possibility of the Exo being a kid.

"I was probably 'bout your age or so before I got this way. The metal part. I think the Traveler was already with us then. Had to be. We didn't have Exos and super fancy space tech until then." He realized he was kind of jumping around on the topic, but he was trying to work out where to start. He'd get back to Guardians eventually. "You guys ever get introduced to something super shiny and new and amazing that you had no idea what or how it came to be or it's true purpose, but suddenly you just had access to information and things that had all the while been juuuust out of reach?

"For us, that was the Traveler. Just arrived one day in our atmosphere, this giant, sphere in the sky, smaller'n the moon but bigger than anything else we'd ever seen."

The look wasn't warranted, it wasn't like Tony had any better context for what a Guardian to Cayde was supposed to be and he responded to the expression with spread hands and raised eyebrows, innocent. That he was a Guardian wasn't much better context, that wasn't a title Tony was familiar with and 'our Light' didn't resolve the issues, but it did make more sense than Cayde requiring supervision. He could probably use it, but he wasn't asking anyone's permission to go play.

"Uh...nnno," Tony replied quietly to Cayde's hyper-specific defining life experience with a similar look on his face as he had to the chickens, but, somehow, feeling a little apologetic about it. Sorry, that wasn't something they were going to bond over. "Was this before or after the end of the world?"

There was a sturdy looking plank at the side of the road that Tony thought he could sweep down to pluck up and inspect, only to meet resistance. It seemed to be part of a larger palette, bolted over what looked like a storm door, camouflaged by overgrowth and rot that made it easy enough for Tony to yank a chunk free once he knew what he was actually facing. "Who are you?" he muttered to it.

"Before," the Hunter replied, looking off elsewhere into the distant darkness, his thoughts slipping briefly into his scattered memories, even as he listened to Tony work at his wood finding.

"I'm Cayde-Six, Hunter Vanguard of the Last City. Exos append numbers to the name whenever they reboot. I'm fine with six. Like where I'm at. No telling who I'd be at seven and I'm not sure how much of the other fives' still in me, but at least I'm all Cayde."

He turned back towards Tony, holding up the rag should the other have finally found something to work with. "That talk about the Traveler was the preamble. It got people into space and terraforming planets and setting up stations and whatnot in a glorious Golden Age of technology. You probably would have loved it." Tony had made no secret of his deep interest in advanced technology, after all.

"I used to be a bounty hunter. Guess sometimes I still kind of am, but ever since becoming Vanguard for the Hunters, I got stuck behind a desk over being out on the field. That's another story." He waved it off with the hand still holding the bottle. "One of my jobs went sideways, lot of collateral damage to the orbital station we were on- happened to also be owned by one of the head tech companies...."

He trailed off, letting his hand drop as optics widened and then narrowed at a sudden thought. The first bark of a laugh could have been a cough as it forced its way out, the Exo shaking his head. "Transhumanist. Hell, that's Clovis Bray in a nutshell."

"Oh, no, I meant..." Tony started to explain as Cayde answered the question Tony hadn't meant for him, pointing vaguely at the door he had found with his stick but not really wanting to interrupt once Cayde had explained the numeration. 'At least I'm all Cayde' was supposed to be positive, Tony thought, but, perhaps a little too late, he found himself finally listening when Cayde said he kept dying, and it only made Tony's heart ache. It made him bolt on a smile when Cayde turned back, holding up his plank to mirror Cayde with the rag before taking it from him to knot around the end of the stick.

Cayde was giving him plenty of data points, but not a lot to knit them together-- was a Hunter different than a Guardian? Did they all have Light? Why were they terraforming, what planets hadn't been claimed by another species already? The question he ended up asking, though, was, "Is that a good thing?" It didn't really sound like it, Cayde hadn't been too taken with the idea.

It was a complicated segue but everything was strung together. Cayde just had to loop back around. There was method to his madness, always was.

"Good? Eh, I'm not the one to say. Anyway that was centuries ago. Point being, Bray gave me an out, clear my debts. So I took it." He gestured loosely at himself. "Volunteered myself up to become an Exo. Did I regret it? Hell, I have no idea. Maybe? Way past that now. I'm good. I like being me. Like I said, centuries ago and only so many of those memories from when I was flesh and blood are still floating around in here."

He waited for Tony to fasten the rag around the plank before offering the bottle to douse it with.

"Things were good. And then one day they weren't. The Traveler was being chased. Eventually it caught up with it- the Darkness. I'm not saying that to sound all ominous, that's just what we know it as, and it came in fast and hit hard. Near wiped everything out. Traveler saved us, but whatever it did put it out of commission for a long time. It gave a part of itself, somehow. The Ghosts, little Lights. They went out and found us, and whoever was brought back- boom, you've got your Guardians." He laughed. "Of course it doesn't happen nearly so smooth as that might sound- I freaked out when I came to after Sundance found me, smacked her and ran myself right off a cliff- she hadda bring me back again. What a first impression," he fondly reminisced.

That was One, and Tony found himself laughing, too, at the casual recount, even with his brow still bunched in baffled concern. The timeline still wasn't making a lot of sense to him, and Tony wasn't sure how invasive this question was but he was asking anyway, "How long have to been Six?"

He held out the almost complete torch for Cayde to pour his juice, still not convinced that this would be an effective fuel but it wasn't like they had anything to lose. If it didn't work, they could just get Cayde to scream at anything they couldn't work out in the dark.

Outage

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