So you suck a deep breath in through your teeth. "...You gonna be mad if I say I actually did need something?"
"Everyone needs something, I'm the only one here who can fly your damn birds. For now." Clara rolls her eyes and makes a 'get on with it' kinda gesture, which, one, fair, but two, come on???
But you're being literally invited even if she's being a jerk about it, so, here you go. "I'd been hoping to get your attention for the attack on Harrow Park. Eyes in the sky, for whatever that's worth?"
"Mmm." She kinda bobs her head back and forth. "...There's the time delay to compensate for, and I'll have to pull some birds outta their usual routes, but...yeah, I could do it. What's a few dozen more lives on my plate? Yeah, you got it."
"Clara -"
She points a gently clawed finger at you. "Don't you fucking 'Clara' me, y'hear me? Do not. Absolutely fucking do not. I got to live the fucking high life my whole life living up to this. My granddad put those birds in the skies, my father helped kill cellular and spent most of his career dragging cable down into the fucking dirt so the bottom line could stay fat, and I got to go to good schools, and have private tutors, and get bought off of teenage crimes an' shit. I was drinking sparkling wine with my tits out on silk sheets you could drape a whale in, y'hear me? Built on the misery of others after Peepaw did his best to put some good in the world. So don't you 'oh woe is Clara' me you fuckin' bleeding heart amnesiac, alright? This is the toll. I lived it up and now I gotta pay."
Something hot rises in your chest and your face, and before you can think not to, you bark out: "If this's you paying up, what'd all those people who fucking died do, huh?"
She flinches. Like you hit her. Rolls on her side so she doesn't have to look at you, and in the smallest voice you've ever heard from Clara, she says: "...Nothing."
You take a deep breath.
And then another one.
"...I do want you here, Clara," you murmur. "You and your friends from the Station, even if most of 'em don't seem to wanna talk much to me. It's fine. They don't gotta like me or be around me. But I like you just fine. You say you're useless? C'mon. Help me make you useful. What do we need to do so you're not out of a job?"
"Got any spare legs I can put on and take off?" She must hear your semi-panicked noise because she snorts. "That one was sarcasm, fearless leader. Honestly everything I want to do has a hard time limit and needs an army of fucking scribes and archivists. There's so much knowledge preserved online but it's in danger. Those servers won't stay running forever; shit, a plurality of them are already down. We can download the data, sure, but even if you solve the storage issues hardware degrades...and the power requirements." She sighs. "...Should killed Dad the moment I leapt out of the womb, honestly. Him putting the kibosh on cable really fucked us. Some of the infrastructure is there, or could be co-opted, but right now just for Salt Bay City that's a megaconstruction we don't have the corpses or the metal for. 's why I'm trying to knife fight Hodges in here, y'know? If I have to crash the birds to stop this, that's it. It's over. I was always the engineer of us..."
You approach, cautiously. She gives you a bit of a look, but doesn't stop you from putting a hand on her upper arm. Her skin is moist, and warm. "Who's us?" you ask, softly. "...Who's Hodges?"
Clara sets her head back down. "You know who owns every technological solution? The people who install it. There were about eight of us in the current generation, the heirs to the fucking infrastructure, the workers who kept the internet running. Hundreds, thousands, billions of users, and just eight kept it all going. We had to sign contracts to never be on the same airplane 'cause if we all went down the whole network went down with us. Fucking feudal-ass shit, passed down to family heirs, honestly. We're such assholes. Hodges was the security guy. The gatekeeper of the kingdom of the fucking internet, right? Empress always figured he was her guy, which. Heh. Wrong. That's the thing with an engineer you can't kill. He's always gonna know more than you."
"...I sense you have a cynical relationship with authority," you say slowly. "And I'm vaguely afraid for my life."
"If I think you're becoming an authority I'll let you know when to start worrying. I can at least do you that nice, you saved my friends." Clara closes her eyes and sighs. "...Landlines. For the phones. You get me copper and blacksmiths and engineers and I'll get you telecommunications. And in the meantime, I dunno. I can scout the Bay. When this thing with Hodges is done. However it ends."
"However -"
"Hodges might be the admin but I can still fucking see, you know?" Clara interrupts. "Right now there's rural communities using my birds to look up tutorials on how to build machines, or purify water, or start up farms 'cause they were factory towns without a field to their fucking names. Right now there's people with no doctors frantically trying to save lives from infections or figure out which medicines are safe and why. There's still people on a couple of the more resilient social media sites, keeping each other up, sharing advice, trying to...trying to live. I crash the network to save Throne, and all of them die, Orchid. All of 'em. So which is it, y'know? I can fail to stop Hodges or, fucksake, help him, and absolutely know I killed everyone in Throne, or I can take it all down, and never know how many people I killed." She reaches up, and taps the case of her laptop. "Hell of a murder weapon, isn't it? It plays cat videos too."
"I'm sorry," you whisper.
"I'm not," Clara lies. "...Go away. Come back tomorrow."
So you go. What else is there to do?
* * * *
Diamond and her girls will be traveling relatively light. They're going to be joined by most of your honor guard, and Kayleigh surprises you by asking to come along for this conversation. "I'm kinda...hoping for some exposure therapy," she admits, scratching at her arm.
"Got a thing about spiders?" you ask gently.
"Strippers. Dad cheated on mom with...doesn't matter. I know it's his fault. But." She makes a complicated noise. "I hate that knowing the reasons behind your bullshit doesn't let you just will it away like a magic spell."
"Is it better than not knowing?"
"Oh, yeah, gods yeah. Why, do you not know?"
You shake your head, and Kayleigh, wordlessly, claps you on the shoulder with a look of intense sympathy.
So uh. Let's go find the spiders - hey look, there they are! Almost like they're the tallest people here, and easily spotted! Weird how that works!
"Don't try to tell me not to go," Diamond says by way of greeting.
You give a long, long, 'uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh'. "That...was...never on the table? I understood immediately why you had to go? People are in danger."
Diamond gives you a surprised look, and then an odd one. And she flicks her glance to Kayleigh, and you think you have a guess why. The new girls have been eating human flesh, which is not a great look, but they're also feral. But...hoo okay...
"Listen," you continue. "I just. Wanna know what the plan is?"
Oh boy. There's a lot of blank stares all of a sudden. You drag a hand down your face.
Advise 2
[ ] Patience; observe, understand, then act, even if it endangers some of the girls
[ ] Discretion; don't get caught in a fight, leave one
[ ] Bloodlust; most of you haven't killed anyone before. You need to let yourselves hate these people
[ ] Inhumanity; some of you have adapted better than others. You need to think like a spider or you'll get run down like a human
[ ] Ruthlessness; the people you're there to rescue might not be in a position to accept your help. Force the issue if you have to
