Logs:Picking Up the Pieces

Picking Up the Pieces
Dramatis Personae B, Budi
In Absentia Shane	2024-10-08 "If more things worked like that the world would be easy."
Location <MOJ> Brotherhood House - Mojoverse
This is a largish house that has been very unevenly appointed, its decorator gone somewhat heavy-handed with red and purple color theming in all the decor. The ground floor has a spacious kitchen that is nearly empty of any equipment or food. The adjacent sitting room has a very comfortable eclectic range of seating, though no tables; there is a truly enormous television setup taking up the entirety of one wall that plays nothing but Mojo's own baffling network all day. There is an extremely well furnished gym on the basement level, as well as a small library that is entirely stocked with hundreds of copies of "The Pop-Up Book of Phobias", except for one singular copy of the NFT Guide to Manhattan. There's a small yard tucked out behind the basement door. There are enough bedrooms split across the top two levels for everyone to pair up, though they haven't been "furnished" so much as someone has hastily chucked mattresses and bedding into them. The sheets and blankets are extremely soft and comfortable, at least. Though there are two bathrooms on each level with excessively luxurious soaking tubs and capacious showers, there do not seem to be toilets in any of them. There's a growing collection of gadgetry in the basement, ranging from mundane to nonsensical, piling up beside the Peloton, many in some condition of disassembly. One weight bench has been converted to a low table by dint of a cabinet door balanced carefully on it, half-covered with an array of odds and ends -- circuitry and wires wound into neat coils, capacitators and transformers, nuts and bolts, dials and switches and fans, bits and bobs with no real Earth equivalent -- capsules of some jellylike energy source, scraps of unusual metals, a dissected robotic "egg" with strange organic tendrils connecting the arms and legs to the central drive. It might be hard to tell what all of this might add up to but it's been meticulously and beautifically knolled and organized -- well, beautific aside from one or two bits of Mojotech that glow in a distinctly unpleasant, oozing way. Budi is squatting on the floor beside the table, carefully prying components out of the largely-depleted chassis of what used to be a robotic vendor. Most of this is, alas, in the "unidentifiable Mojo crap" category and quite a bit of it seems to be covered in a corrosive lubricant, which he's scraping carefully into an empty soup can with a sharp-cut scrap of metal. His lungi has been tucked up carefully, out of the way of anything that might spark or fizzle or spit acid, but the lungi and his t-shirt already sport a few weird green stains. Budi himself seems mostly unhurt, any burns or pinches already prodigiously on the mend, and he's in fairly high spirits. "Oh-ho," he's saying now, holding a translucent amber orb up to the light, one eye squinting appreciatively. "No guess what it does but, pretty. Looks important." B is sitting cross-legged on an upturned crate pulled over alongside the table to serve as her stool. Her hands and face are peppered with a tiny crisscrossing of small marks -- burns, dry-cracking lines -- that make her too-dry skin look scalier than usual, but despite this less than healthy appearance she's got a quick smile in return when she looks over at Budi's find. "In a video game that's definitely the place you hit to kill the boss." Her brow pinches and she leans in to peer at it a little closer, her eyes going slightly narrower in the light. "Actually maybe that's not far wrong, one of the other bots had a processor a lot like that. I think if you get it clean enough it could be helpful, I am so close to getting our friends," she's flicking her claws towards the Peloton, "out of this dumb bike and a little bit more mobile." Budi gives this a cheerful bobbing nod, lowering his hand again to get back at the orb with his scraper, which is a little too straight to work efficiently on something so perfectly round, leaving streaky opaque-ish trails of fluid glazed over the polished surface. "Hard to tell if this is so smooth or oily still," he says, stretching one long arm out to grab at a cut-up scrap of destroyed uniform (red and purple) now serving as a rag. "Your friends are very smart to figure out the bike works like a phone," he says. "Does it only work when they call us? Or can you call them? I have no head for --" he flips the rag over one shoulder to gesture lacksadaisically with the scraper. "Electrics. Only for taking apart! Ha, ha." He follows this non-laugh with a more genuine pointy-toothed grin, stretched very wide on his face. "They're --" B stops a moment. It's hard to tell whether she's considering the subject of her friends or the small arcane alien widget she is carefully attaching to a circuitboard right now, but when she is done her task she nods decisively. "Pretty smart. I can't call them on the bike. Hopefully our new mobile Earth-phone will be able to make outbound calls. 50-50 it just blows all its circuits when we try. Normally it's an exciting kind of anticipation but also normally there's not like, a daily body count the longer I take with this kind of thing." She turns her head, glancing down the table toward Budi. "Must have some. Taking apart without frying yourself is halfway there already." Though she's looking at some of his healing burns and giving a small closed-lipped smile, a small amused addition: "... without frying yourself much." "Yeah, no good times dying," Budi agrees more solemnly, rubbing the orb with his scrap of uniform fabric (a little more holey where the grease has eaten through the fabric) and then on the ragged hem of his t-shirt. "I worked before in, ehh, salvage," he says. "For a while. Computers, tablets, phones." He pauses to inspect one hand, his grin tinging now with faint embarrassment -- "I never fried myself so much back then, but this Mojo stuff. Why use acid for machine grease? Do slugs not burn?" When he gets up he is -- not very much taller than he had been in the squat, though he's very springy on his feet as he skirts his pile of broken-apart robot to loom over the table, then frowns at the extremely spherical orb before carefully arranging his woebegotten rag into a cushiony nest on the table. "Maybe the slime protects them. Maybe they like the burning. Maybe if you're a slug it's a nice tingle. They stitch their eyes open for fashion so I don't know what assumptions to make about what's going on with their nerves." B shudders, a little bit, her gills giving a quick ripple along with the motion. "Huh. Back in -- Madripoor, right? Pretty handy. I mean, it would've taken us a lot longer to collect some of this and -- I'm guessing once everyone's dead they might start to notice something's up." At first she sounds a little amused by this prospect, but then she's going kind of tenser, eyes fixing back down on her work. "I mostly started by taking a lot of things apart. Then -- just paying closer attention so I could do it backwards. Then actually learning what was going on with the pieces. It's kind of just a puzzle. This guy," she's hooking her clawtips very delicately against the contraption she's currently working on, guts of several different machines being pieced together in the shell of what once was a small and vicious fighting robot from Somewhere Outside, "is an atrocious hackjob but you probably know a lot of the pieces already? I could. Talk you through some of. What I'm doing." Budi sinks back into his squat, shakes his hands out before attacking his hollowed-out robot again, with a slight wince as he delicately plucks a long greasy connecting rod out of the carnage. Half-hidden where his head is bowed over his work, another smile is spreading onto his face, closed-lipped and shy this time -- "Little handy," he demurs. "Yes, in Madripoor. Is --" He shrugs one shoulder, then shrugs again with a little more vim. "When you say it you make it sound easy," he says, but he's getting uncertainly back up, eyes stretching wider at B's gizmo. "Oh! Oh yes. If you do not mind. I would like that." He sets the connecting rod very carefully back down, balanced on the rim of the chassis to drip down into it. "I maybe know the pieces. Maybe in Bahasa Malayu only." "It is easy," B replies immediately, but then ducks her head with a small flattening of her gills. "I just mean. It always made sense to me when a lot of other stuff didn't. Not a lot of things I'm great at, but." She shrugs. "A lot of the world is really messy. This stuff, it's like, you learn how it works, and you do it right, and then it does the thing you want it to do. If more things worked like that the world would be easy." She scoots a little bit closer, nudging the half-done robot closer to Budi. "My brother's amazing with languages and I'm really not but maybe I will learn. A little bit of -- Bahasamaley? And be able to have, um, no conversation with anyone unless the only thing they want to say is 'snap circuit' or 'capacitator'." She's flicking her claws towards the pieces in question as she mentions them, and then settling in a little more comfortably. "Anyway, considering what else we've been up to here, I mean. This stuff's way easier than dying."