revivalproject

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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.

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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.

If all else failed, Cayde supposed he had at least one party trick up his sleeve, but it wouldn't do good in the long run. He was still really holding out on that this drink stuff would burn as potently as it hit people when ingested. Which was probably why he nearly upended the entirety of the bottle's contents over the rag, just to make sure it was thoroughly soaked.

"Huh? Oh. Honestly, I can't remember how long it's been since my last reboot." He paused. "Incidentally, reboots aren't the same as deaths- otherwise I'd be like...Cayde-somethin' hundred. The Light fixes that. Reboots are...they're for the mental side." He tapped at his noggin. "Human brains and robot bodies don't mesh so well- who'd have thought?" With a slight roll of his eyes, he shrugged. "So Bray's fix was to reboot Exos every so often- ease up the mental stress. Can't do it too much or it really messes things up in there. Got a friend named Banshee-Forty-Four, and the number's not just for show. Poor ol' guy forgets things left and right."

With just an inch or two sitting in the bottle, Cayde eyed it before tipping it into his own mouth. Wouldn't do a thing for him, but there was something for going through the motion at least.

"Not much helping for it either, any working research on improving things fell through when the Darkness hit and there was a hell of a lapse between then and when Guardians finally started getting their act together and survivors gathered to rebuild." Just thinking back on it made him feel old, which he figured there was no point in denying, but reminiscing was a reminder of people that had been lost for good, too. He rolled his shoulders back, tapping his fingers against the empty bottle in hand as he tilted his head at Tony.

"So, got a light?"

The liberal soaking made Tony snort, stretching the torch further away to avoid any splashback on his shoes and continued to hold it out after Cayde seemed satisfied with his handwork, the rag dripping a generous pattering of juice on the ground between them. This was certainly going to do something.

The winding tale of Cayde's long, lived history had been engrossing enough to distract Tony for this long from the question of an Exo's mechanics, but that was bound to come back in full force eventually. There wasn't any filter in place that could have stopped Tony from asking, "Do you still have a wet brain?" with an unmasked curl of disgust. That should have been the first thing to go, that thing was unreliable.

Right, the matches. Tony started to pat down his pockets, sure he hadn't left them anywhere since tying the bundle together.

It had better do something, otherwise it'd just be awkward. Never mind that Cayde was beginning to have his own doubts about it- he was stubbornly going to hold on to that belief that this thing would catch fire up until it either did or didn't.

He squinted at Tony, but otherwise didn't seem terribly put off by the question. Maybe he was starting to acclimate to the man's behavior. "Presumably? That's why we Exos got issues. Not that I'm all that eager to crack my head open and check though."

Assuming that the guy was looking for something to try lighting their makeshift torch, Cayde tried not to tap his foot as he waited.

Tony's expression said that he was eager, because that was a sincerely weird design choice, and he hadn't considered yet at all that Cayde had any one of his original organs somewhere in the works. He had even opened his mouth to ask, but the matches were in hand by then and Tony had absently struck one alight on his belt and moved to find out if the juice would ignite.

It exploded.

"Fu--!" Tony's instinct was to fling himself away from it, but his second mistake was to throw the torch down, dropping the flame and the already disintegrated bundle of matches he had still held in his hand into the muddy puddle of juice between them. The reaction burst outward, making the weeds lining the road flare up so quickly that the fire had eaten through one almost as soon as it had made its leap, creating a rippling wave of scorched earth from the blast zone that hissed and steamed angrily as it fell into the puddles of the flood plain.

See, that was the problem right there. Cayde had a feeling Tony would be all over any possibility of seeing what all made the Exo tick. Thankfully they were for the moment thoroughly diverted by the more than visible proof that yes, the so-called juice? Very much flammable.

Cayde had taken a step back with something of a yelp as the flames erupted perhaps even more eagerly than Tony's hopes to poke at his brains. Throwing a hand up before his face had been a secondary reaction, but it was half out of fascination that he watched the rest unfold as Tony dropped the torch into an unfortunate spot and the fire started to spread outwards.

"See! What'd I tell you!" Maybe now wasn't exactly the best time to point out such a triumph but the Exo was the sort to take what he could get. Also, he liked being right. He paused as he watched at least some of the flames meet resistance by the sogginess of the flood plain, and then almost comically darted over to where the fire still licked along the weeds to try stomping them out.

The fire burned white hot at its base around the combustible fuel, ensuring that their torch was most definitely as gone as the local overgrowth problem, throwing orange sparks up several feet into the sky that Tony was sure could be seen from the hotel at least. On the other side of the crackling display, Tony had fallen back onto his ass and did a crab-walk scramble away from the heat, staying put in the dirt as he panted through the adrenaline spike and Cayde went prancing into the charcoal.

Belatedly, he reached to check with his less scorched hand the tender skin of his face, definitely ten minutes too long in the tanning bed, then rubbed the soot that had been his eyebrow between his fingers with a pout. He didn't really know how long that would take to grow back, that wasn't a test he had put his healing abilities through yet. He dropped both hands back onto the road to slouch back with a sigh, watching Cayde's largely pointless attempt at damage control with a growing grin. "What is this, Riverdance? What are you doing? You missed a spot." So much for the torch. The door that Tony had torn into for the plank gave a shuddering grown as the fire consumed its last tenuous hold on its hinges, and it fell inward to rumble away down into the tunnel, throwing up another gust of soot and smoke into the burn.

Cayde stumbled back and twirled around to make sure the ends of his already raggedy cloak weren't catching fire behind his back. He took a moment to try directing a frown at Tony but the man's grin and maybe his missing eyebrow made it very difficult to keep a chuckle from bubbling up.

That he knew he probably looked pretty ridiculous trying to stamp out the fire didn't really help either. In spite of the fact that they could have potentially if accidentally razed a part of the city, the Exo started to laugh because the circumstances that had led up to it suddenly struck him as incredibly funny.

"Lookin' toasty, Stark. You all right?" He wandered over after one last, halfhearted stomp of a boot, to flop down beside Tony, still snickering. "Aw hell, what a mess."

The laugh was infectious, and Tony was perfectly alright, giggling through, "How's my beard, is it okay?" as Cayde approached, turning his chin in the light of the fire as though he was really concerned. One of them really should have been able to anticipate this outcome, they had gone into it with such confidence.

"It's not so bad," he insisted once he could keep his voice even because, in the grand scheme of things, this wasn't really the worst thing Tony had done tonight alone. He turned to brush some ash from Cayde's hood that-- oh, that had been part of the hood, sorry about that, it could probably be patched by someone with the skills that Tony's grimace suggested he certainly did not. "Think of it this way, anyone else could have been here. Luckily, nobody's been down this road in weeks, not a soul." By the time the fire burned out, it was going to be hard to tell what happened and it wasn't going to be easy to point any fingers.

"What's left of it, anyway," the Exo reassured before squinting. "-oh wait, that's how it always is." He grins and gives Tony a light elbowing.

Turning his gaze back towards the flames as though they were just enjoying a casual bonfire. They were lucky to have been doing this somewhere damp, and not say, in the middle of the city where they'd be sure to attract a lot of concerned people's attention. "Yep. Totally wasn't an accident. Everyone should be asleep anyway, not wandering around in the dark like certain other parties I won't mention by name."

After a moment he glanced back at Tony. "...I won't tell if you won't."

Tony was happy to nod along, confident in their alibi, until the dig at his nocturnal wandering and eased a sidelong glance Cayde's way, canting his shoulder away like he was ready to fight back if he had to and Cayde was going to try to pin this on him. Tony could fight dirty, he hadn't lost a he-said robot-said in his life, he was ready to throw Cayde under ten buses if he wanted to play that game.

It would have been fun, but Tony wasn't about to turn down the deal. "I've never met this man in my life," he agreed. "Shockingly handsome, though, we should get a drink sometime. Have you tried the juice? I've heard it feels the same way coming out. Burns all the way through."

It wasn't much of a dig, really. Cayde had been partially referring to himself as well, not that he didn't have a good reason for wandering about late at night. He arched a metal brow at the man, along with the slightest cant of his head as if waiting to see which foot would drop, even if he wasn't too sure why one would be over the other.

Then came Tony's response, and the Exo grinned that amber-lit grin of his. "I know, the blue and gunmetal look is especially fetching, and that beautiful, beautiful horn." Never mind that Tony probably wasn't referring to him. "Eh, I've had better, but the juice still doesn't disappoint."

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Outage

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