ArchivedLogs:Nerds Saved the World

Nerds Saved the World
Dramatis Personae Kelly, Sebastian	2013-11-27 Kelly admires Sebastian's creations, and has a cold. (Part of Infected TP.)
Location <XS> Roof
It's nearing curfew, though not quite there yet; even so the /cold/ and the intermittent rain and snow that have been starting and stopping all day mean that most student have long since tucked themselves away inside the mansion. It's quiet up here at the moment. A brief flurry, now ended, has left a faint dusting of snow on the rooftop -- though one small patch of that is currently rapidly being /melted/ by two pairs of bright lights, circular and nested in the wingtips of a sleek metallic-blue dragonfly half a foot long. Not, really, just metallic in its /shade/, though it's been anodized to a vivid blue, but metallic altogether -- though it moves similarly to an insect it is distinctly made out of metal. The dragonfly is hovering over the rooftop, coming in for a slow landing. It's soon joined by a second (this one green) and then a third (in a sort of purplish shade), congregating by each other like they've stopped off for a /chat/. The odd lights caught Kelly's attention from the windows bellow, and as he creeps slowly out the door to watch, he's bundled up tightly in jacket and a throw wrapped around his shoulders. Though the odd thing is that his feet are bare even as it starts to push into a pile of slush met with a shiver. His flowers and vines are mostly hidden, but there are odd bunches and wiggling parts of him that just shouldn't be. When he watches the three things land, it's through bleary eyes, but he still laughs lightly when he sees them. "H-hello?" he tries to greet the giant things, carefully inching his way clear of the door. There's a quiet noise -- THWIP -- from somewhere around the edge of the roof, and then a very small figure is swinging his way up from -- somewhere below, apparently. Sebastian is bundled up, too, boots and a warm puffy jacket. The tiny shark-boy reaches into the inside of his jacket once he's on the roof, tugging out a black Stark Industries tablet. "They don't talk. Should they talk, do you think? They listen. Speakers would be more weight though." "Oh," Kelly says, his round puffy cheeks starting to get red from the cold as he moves closer to them. "I thought they were real, like the student in the barn." He answered, still under the belief that the giant dragonfly was another student, "Guess that was silly, but uhm... I guess talking is important... Are they kinda like those toy helicopters in the mall?" His voice is already a delighted amazement, eyes wide, though still not QUITE understanding what he was seeing yet. "Student in the barn? Which student?" Sebastian sounds a little puzzled, stepping away from the edge of the roof to crouch down a short distance away from the dragonflies. "They're kind of for surveillance right now so I didn't -- make them talk, it wasn't really. Necessary but. I guess they /could/ if there were a reason." His arms fold against his chest, hugging the tablet against his jacket. "They're -- yeah. Kind of, I guess. I mean they do fly. Do you want to, um --" Sebastian's tone shifts, now, kind of diffident; he toys with an edge of the tablet shyly. "Do you want to -- see?" "Oh wait, you... made these things?" Kelly asked surprised. "I kinda thought your brother was kidding when he mentioned the robot in the lake..." The admission there comes out a little sheepish, but he shuffles his way over to take a peek at what Sebastian's holding. "If you don't mind, that's... that's really cool." "Oh yeah, the one Jax went to check on, the really huge dragonfly? I forget her name..." Kelly blushed out. "I mean, it got kinda crazy there and... was just glad to get out alive." "The fish in the lake was much harder," Sebastian admits with a very small twitch of smile. "Mostly because he was my /first/ experiment with autonomous 3D movement. Just -- walking on one surface is easy. Swimming and flying was a lot --" His cheeks flush a little bit darker. He unfolds his arms to hold the tablet in his hands; at the moment its screen is just full of smaller tiled windows, each with a different streaming-video view of the grounds around the school. Three of the windows are still. He taps on one, bringing it up to fill half the screen with a set of controls beneath. "Here look. I can take him off autopilot. Here's up and down and forward and backwards and -- rotate with these and this'll go faster," a light tap of claw indicates all these different controls; as he shows them, the green dragonfly lifts off the ground, the image shifting as it moves. Now Kelly and Sebastian are seen on the screen, through the camera view in the dragonfly's eyes. "Here, you try?" He offers the tablet towards Kelly. His puzzled look has only grown until comprehension dawns: "Oh. Oh, you mean /Sugar/? She's not a student. She actually /is/ a dragonfly. Smarter than most but not like. People-smart. Maybe like dog-smart. Pa looks after her." The look on Kelly's face is very close to a todler's on Christmas as he watches the metallic green thing move and dash. He pays close attention to the controls, the side of his tongue slipping out the corner of his mouth, and then carefully gives it a spin himself. He does... not the best. Not quite as bad as to crash the thing, but its obvious he's not tried to fly anything before. "Oh man, I better let you have this back, I don't wanna break it." He says soon after, his breath coming out in a fog. "I wouldn't know where to start /at all/ with something like this, I think even my bird houses were lopsided in shop class." But... hearing the explanation of the 'student', Kelly's already pink face blushes as red as Strawberry pie. "Oh... now I feel stupid." "It's okay. I have seven of them. You should've seen how many times I lit them on fire when I was trying to build the first model." Sebastian's nose crinkles up, his cheeks still dark. "My coworkers just kept. Resupplying me with fire extinguishers." His eyes track the movement of the dragonfly as Kelly flies it, his mouth curling into a small closed-lipped smile. "Do you want one? I can -- it doesn't have to be like these. Maybe just one for flying not for --" He waves a hand out towards the ground. "The other four are keeping an eye out for um. In case --" He shakes his head, and curls one arm around his knees. "It's not stupid. Around here who /knows/. We have a student who's sometimes a wolf and a student who's sometimes a dragon." This last one he says just a tiny bit bitterly. "Oh gosh, having something like this would be awesome, but... gosh, it looks like its expensive and hard to make." The floral mutant stated bashfully with a sniffle of his nose. Perhaps standing barefoot in the snow wasn't QUITE the healthiest choice in the world. He tried to get the dragonfly to circle around and look at him and Sebastian, taking it very VERY slowly. "Oh, so like, this was a group project? I guess I can't talk, cause like, sometimes I'm a tree... well, no, not really a tree. I guess I'm more of a bush." He giggles a bit and then stares down at himself through the robot's eyes. "Gosh man, this is a heck of a lot cooler than building ships in a bottle." "No, it was my project. I just work in a -- an office with a lot of --" Sebastian's voice drops quieter, shier as his claws pick at one boot. "Nerds, I guess, um, but things end up on fire kind of a lot at my. Work." The camera view on the screen changes at the robot slowly circles around. "I'd really made these for work but with the zombies around um. I thought maybe the school could use some extra -- eyes. I've been trying to get them to /recognize/ zombies but that part is a lot -- harder. I'm hoping I can work with their gait patterns to --" At the sides of his neck, his gills are fluttering, a motion that comes with an odd hitchier quality to his words. "Being a tree is kind of cool. At least I know a guy who's a tree and he's pretty hardcore." His brows draw together at the sniffle, though. "-- Are you sick?" "I'm pretty sure any student job I had would have fired me if I set anything on fire." Kelly's nose sniffles again, but he shakes his head. "Nuh-uh, not sick or anything, I kinda lucked out through this." Kelly said quietly as he continued to control the robot a bit, but then slowly handed the controls back to Sebastian. "I think that was probably a good idea, I mean, I ran into a batch of 'em twice outside... but... like, how could you tell the difference between a zombie and, well, someone who was hurt? Or super sleepy? I know I..." Achoo! "Ugh... I mean, I know I'm kinda wobbly when I'm sleepy." "Well, that's the problem I'm having, right? Because there's software out there that's pretty good at motion reading but how do you really /know/ it's zombie and not just. Drunk or tired or hurt. And -- I mean these are just for surveillance it's not like they have /weapons/ so really a pretty adequate answer would be 'it doesn't matter' since my false positive rate won't do anything except /ping/ people unnecessarily and it's better to have that happen than ignore an /actual/ zombie but I am -- kind of a perfectionist I guess," Sebastian admits with a sheepish duck of his head, "so 'pretty adequate' just makes me kind of frustrated. I could probably take temperature readings? But around here that wouldn't mean a whole lot anyway, /I/ would read as dead by /human/ standards and I know other kids who would too. -- Actually I know one guy who actually /is/ dead, he doesn't really like being called Zombie anymore --" He cuts off his rambling with another deep blush. "-- You should go inside, you're. Getting sick. And people will /freak out/ right now if you get a cold. You'll get the zombie meds /anyway/ and they're no fun." "I've not been saying /any/ of the bad words." Kelly swore and tugged on his throw a little tighter. "But... warm sounds good." He agrees, shuffling towards the door now. "Maybe... look for breathing? Most of us actually breath, right?" He wondered, pointing to Sebastian's gills. "I guess... it might be a little weird for you, though, I mean... you gotta go in the water every now and then, right? But I guess now that they went through the town there's gonna be a whole lot less of 'em." As he opens the door though, and feel the heat of the inside, he turns back to Sebastian: "You know... if being a nerd means you're smart enough to do this? I think that's pretty cool, heck, I think nerds just saved the whole world." "I breathe on land. But the dead guy I know, he doesn't breathe. Actually he's the second person I've known who -- um. But I guess it's not really possible anyway," Sebastian admits, "to program for /all/ the edge cases, mutants are /strange/." He taps at the tablet again, and now all three dragonflies take back to the sky. His blush deepens fiercely at Kelly's last statment, and he rubs slowly at his fluttering gills. His smile is small, and shy. "You should -- get warm. Goodnight, Kelly."