OTA Log

[doubled_speed]

WHO: Tommy Shepherd and Anyone
WHERE: Graq Planet, Agrii Ship
WHAT: Harvesting seeds, capturing animals(?), and trying to learn Science! (TM)
WHEN: During the Return Journey
WARNINGS: None Anticipated?


A. Farming Boy | OTA | Graq Homeworld

Was it strange that he found this world so damn fun? Probably not. The trees were strong, the food was abundant enough that for the first time since coming to their damn level of reality he was full as he needed to be. It was a relief. And the food? Fuck the food was good. Good enough that Tommy had been poking around at the Graq trying to ask questions.

Which was silly. Who needed questions. Tommy just needed the fruits and vegetables. Or at least, the ones he can find that have seeds.

Anyone approaching will find the speedster laying out a variety of fruit on a large piece of stone, considering them before he raises his hands at them.

"You might wanna stand back," he warns, because he's going to try playing with his powers in a whole new way. "These... could explode in a juicy manner. Not sure. Haven't been able to do an explosion since getting here but... well, it's try time."

His hope was that it was just the Agrii ship and planet that fucked with his powers. Then again, if it hadn't... then he had the most awesome idea for trying to get some seeds to long term storage really fast.


B. Bacon Time | OTA | Graq Homeworld, minor Network

Meat. Protein. Fucking GOOD long term food that can be bred and brought up to size with foods that are less desirable to mainly human constitutions? Yeah, Tommy's all on that. Right from the world go on tasting his first side of bacon, he resolves a plan. One that he broadcasts out to the network as a group-text.

Listen. Some of us need meat and protein and all that shit in greater quantities. So I suggest this. A 'hunting' party. We can cure and preserve some of the meat. But I also wanna capture one or two breeding pairs? So we can, like, have more meat in the future? I'm sorry if you're squish and all that, but some of us need this.

Anyway, I'm starting at about noon or whatever noon is here. That's an hour or so. I've put a coordinate point up, and I've woven nets from vines and trip ropes and other stuff. Anyone wanna help?

And at the appointed time, Tommy will be standing at those exact coordinates, with one of those hats like you'd see on an episode of some nature documentary with a wise-cracking Aussie in it. Where he got the hat will have to remain a mystery. Just like why he's doing an Aussie accent. Horribly.

"Well get on their mate, we're huntin' food!"

Horrible


C. Learning Science | OTA | Agrii Ship

The problem with only needing to sleep four hours a day when you're travelling on a ship where the aliens operate on a thirty hour day is... Well, a lot of things. Including keeping oneself entertained when trying not to go crazy from a sense of confinement. Sure, the Agrii ship is a LOT larger than the ships the 'guests' of the Agrii have used, but sooner or later, every space feels confined when he doesn't have a whole planet to explore.

Which had led to the strangest behavior from Tommy Shepherd. All throughout the day the young man can be seen loitering in all sorts of places. He loiters on the bridge, watching the Agrii manage their consoles there. He loiters in the engine room, watching the Agrii and Stark and Tuesti and anyone else who comes in as they look at the new engine core. He crawls through the confined spaces of the Jeffries Tubes and maybe nerds out a little over the idea that he's in a fucking Jeffries Tube because he just happens to be a closet Trekkie and looks at where all of the wires go. He even hangs out in the hangar and watches the people who know how to do it mess with modifying their ships.

Why is he doing it? Well, Calibrations had taught him one thing, if only from the way Tony had stared at him.

Maybe, just maybe, Tommy wasn't as dumb as everyone had always told him he was. Maybe he even wanted to explore that.

So, if he happens by someone studying something, he pipes up with a question.

"How do you think that works?"

And if someone catches him staring as an Agrii is working hard, he waves them back for a second, watching a delicate process complete before looking at them.

"What's up?"

Comments

c

[beholding_archivist]

Jon is anything but an engineer. Chemistry is much rather his scientific field of choice, and yet that doesn't mean he isn't at least somewhat intrigued to learn a little more about the technology present on this ship. They should make use of it as long as they can.

Finding Tommy fascinated by it is- Unexpected? Though Jon won't judge the young man for his curiosity.

"What are you looking at?" He asks with genuine interest as he finds Tommy observing the progress of a pair of Agrii at work. If Jon were to guess, he would assume they are fixing one of the force fields.

[doubled_speed]

"The gleeful arm-bearers working on a force field generator that I... sorta messed up when I was annoyed after it turned off. I might have kicked one of the emitters because I almost concussed myself."

Was it fair to blame the force field? Nope. Had he done it anyway? Totally.

[beholding_archivist]

"Ah." Comes the simple answer and Jon turns his attention to the working Agrii. He at least won't blame Tommy. Mot while he himself is still guilty of breaking the force field around the Green Room when he tried to pull information from the Graq.

The Archivist crosses his arms. "I kind of wish they would just disable them entirely. We saw some of them discharging quite unpleasant looking energy surges while trying to make our way around them after we lost control of the systems." There is a certain concern here. And maybe a little wonder as of what exactly these are meant to accomplish within the ship itself.

[doubled_speed]

"It's a safety thing," Tommy muses. But his tone says he's not pleased by them at all. Things that interrupt his movement piss him off.

And if he learns how they're repaired, he can learn how to take them apart. He hopes.

"The energy surges WERE bad. Hated it. Fuck, this was a horrible few days."

[beholding_archivist]

"It is intended for safety, yes. But we all have seen how flawed this design is in an actual emergency. They lack a manual override." Sure, the technology behind them may be intriguing and maybe even useful in various ways, but Jon is very willing to agree that these force fields were much more a hindrance than anything else when they were trying to reach various places.

Jon sets the matter aside for a moment and turns his entire attention to Tommy, head inclined a little to the side. "Are you enjoying our flight back so far?" It's a harmless question and more gauged to get an idea of Tommy's mood regarding their situation than anything else.

c. sciENCE

[in_extremis]

A speedster appearing, even if that speedster was under the misguided impression that he had been loitering for any extended period of time and could easily be anticipated, was not something Tony had gotten entirely used to, even with his relatively high speedster experience. Pietro, largely, went out of his way not to talk to Tony, or most people if he could avoid it, so being blessed with his presence was usually followed by a brusque question, then an extended period of being completely ignored for Pietro to recharge from so intimate an encounter.

Tommy piping up at Tony's elbow, therefor, earns him a startled glare before Tony was looking back down at the screen, not about to admit that he just about jumped. "Lovely to see you, too, Thomas, oh, hi, yes, I'm doing great, and yourself?" he complained, but didn't actually want to have that conversation at all, kicking aside the architecture he had pulled out of this console to clear a spot for the kid to stand with him in the engine room. "It's an EKF algorithm," he more happily answered, pointing to the calculations; not a familiar written language to Tommy, but math was math and structurally identical despite any language barriers. "But that doesn't usually work for such long range navigation, and I'm having trouble working out what sensor data its using to be at all applicable. Unless this ship wasn't meant to move that far, and this is just a backup navigation system for short jumps." He tapped the wrench he toyed idly with against his chin, obviously not convinced by this theory.

[doubled_speed]

"Not Thomas. Tommy. Don't call me Thomas," Tommy says at first. Because Thomas was what his parents named him. He doesn't like his parents. He prefers the distance.

How's he doing? Going mad over enclosed spaces. At least this ship is larger. It's a lot larger and he is comforted by that. But he's not going to say it. Pointing out that he's claustrophobic makes him uncomfortable. So how about both of them just ignore the 'how are they doing' to instead talk about the other thing.

Tommy leans closer to Tony to look at the algorithm.

"Okay, back up. What's an EKF algorithm? How does it affect navigation, I didn't take the pilot point. Maybe they made use of the portals like the one Ga Re gave us to work with."

[in_extremis]

The distinction was news to Tony, who maybe this once could be convinced not to call someone the first thing that fell out of his mouth, because he had his own complicated relationship with his given name and could understand some limits. Maybe. Tommy might get lucky and Tony might remember the request, occasionally.

"It's a statistical estimation of where objects or phenomena or--things-- are in relation to each other. Your GPS on Earth uses the same calculation. With enough data, it's pretty airtight, and this one is recursive enough that it's got to be checking for any misalignments, but it's still a shockingly basic navigation system for a ship that, as far as we know, can manipulate time and space. If all of the information this algorithm has is the speed at which we are travelling, and a visual point of reference on the nearest planet, that stops mattering quickly when time isn't a single, fixed dataset." So maybe the whole dimensional kidnapping thing hadn't been part of the original intent of this ship, was the point, and there had to be systems that Tony couldn't identify feeding this nav system more information than a few pictures of Graq Prime. Trying to get his hands into the engine works made his brain feel sluggish, though, without someone with the right datapoint to back him up.

[doubled_speed]

Keep calling him Thomas, and he'll call you Anthony. Simple as that.

"That's interesting. Didn't know you could do that. I mean, I guess you have to be able to. Because people know where shit is."

Time not being fixed doesn't even phase Tommy. Knew time travelers. You lived with it. He considers thoughtfully as he pulls away from the screen Tony had given him.

"So, you're doing this why? Trying to see if you can understand them? No offense, they don't seem as educated as you."

[in_extremis]

"People do know where shit is," Tony agreed, a much more succinct way of explaining the nature of the calculation, and it felt like it should have gotten him closer to understanding how exactly this ship had been traversing the cosmos. No luck. He sighed, dropping the wrench that had been occupying his hands down among the wiring, and leaned instead against the console.

"No offence to me, or to them?" he had to ask with a lopsided grin. Tommy was right, Tony was trying to understand some part of what was going on here, but not necessarily the Agrii. "None of this stuff is the Agrii's technology, and now we've inherited it by extension. If we can figure out how this thing runs, we'll know more about the guys at the top orchestrating this whole shitshow, and hopefully be able to bring the fight to them and get everybody home. How a culture builds can say a lot about them. No glass teacups in China." The problem was, Tony was having a more difficult time parsing the hardware than he should have, and had to get creative. "The engine doesn't have a lot to say to me, so I thought I'd check the backdoor," he explained this curiosity about the navigation in particular. "And found a suped up GPS. What does that say? That the other guys gave the Agrii their least impressive junk? Is that because they knew the Agrii weren't as advanced as they were, or because they didn't really care?" If Tommy could act as both engineer and alien cultural psychoanalyst, that would be very helpful.

B; text;

[sinistral]

We may consider trading some of the kill for already preserved supplies, in case our own efforts do not pan out.

[doubled_speed]

Oh man, that's SUPER smart, Bucktastic! I should really figure that out. I just... don't speak the language?

[sinistral]

I think Wanda can communicate with them. Otherwise I'll handle it.

[doubled_speed]

I don't know if she'll be here? But I guess I can try? Can you talk to them? Is that a thing?

[sinistral]

I can't speak their language. But I've had experience with having to make myself understood through gestures.

B

[rage_on]

I'm in.

It's probably no surprise that the turtle's thrown in for a hunting party. At least he comes prepared too, a quiver of arrows and a bow over one shoulder, a coil of rope around the other. He's got a knife tucked into his belt on one side and a pair of climbing claws tied to the other.

"Wow, you sound like an idiot," he grins. "But if you're going for super-cheesy at least you pulled out all the stops. That hat does nothing for you."

[doubled_speed]

Sound like an idiot? Hat looks bad? Tommy's pale eyebrows shoot skyward and he points a finger at Raph's face. Too bad he can't hide the smile as he speaks.

"Careful, or I'm having turtle soup."

[rage_on]

"Like that's the first time I've heard that threat," Raphael says with a roll of his eyes. He smirks and tries tugging the front of Tommy's hat down.

"Just promise me you aren't gonna talk like that the entire time we're out there or I'll find a new use for this rope."

[doubled_speed]

Well of course Tommy wasn't going to take the threat he gave seriously. It was from the show.

"Like you could ever catch me," Tommy grins, but the accent is dropped.

[rage_on]

"Oh here we go again." Raphael supposes it'll be a recurring theme with Tommy when it comes to his speediness.

"Let's do this already. You got any idea of what kinda wildlife's out there? Or are we finding out as we go along?" He's fine with either but it'd help to know there's at least for sure something worthwhile to keep an eye out for.

B

[heeeyadora]

I dunno about how to cut or cure anything, but I can take down whatever needs taking down, that part's easy.

Re: B

[doubled_speed]

We don't have a lot of people who are actually willing to do the deed. You sure you're up to it, Chuckles?

[heeeyadora]

Yeah, sure. What's the big deal? Is it super huge or something?

[doubled_speed]

Massive. With bunny ears?

[heeeyadora]

If everyone else is too scared or whatever I can handle it.