[] Social (Dragon & Shipwright)
Heatwave 9.13
Thursday, June 16
"Look, Kayleigh, I appreciate the thought, but I don't know that I'll be able to make it anyway—"
"Taylor, this is your birthday we're talking about!" Kayleigh whines, making you once again regret answering this call. Your friend has spent the last half-hour pushing for you to have a birthday party, heedless of your protests that you really don't need one. Protests that are getting weaker partly because your resilience is flagging in the face of her enthusiasm and partly because arguing against having a party feels really weird. "Do you have other plans? Are you already throwing a party and haven't invited me?"
"No, I'm not throwing a party at all. I don't need one."
"Every girl needs and deserves a sweet sixteen party!"
Samantha walks out of the kitchen, a half-eaten apple in her hand. "You know, Taylor, I kind of agree with your friend here."
"See?"
"Kayleigh! Samantha!" You look back and forth between the screen and the Guardian Beast. Neither of them apologizes, and Samantha gives you a flat stare, all but daring you to keep refusing. "Seriously, I don't need a party. It's only a few days until my birthday, anyway, so there wouldn't even be time to set anything up or get anything or invite anybody. No point trying to throw a party without food or guests."
"Hey, hey, hey! Don't you worry about a thing. I'll throw you a party here at my house, and I'll text all our girl friends and tell 'em to be here. All you have to do is show up before they do. Five-fifteen on Sunday, they'll get here five-thirty. We'll eat, gossip, have a ton of fun. Just trust me on this one."
Samantha smirks at you. "Sounds good, Kayleigh. I'll make sure Taylor shows."
With a squeal of delight, Kayleigh hangs up the phone. You can now turn your entire attention towards the raccoon-woman who is supposed to be looking out for you. "Really, Sam? Really?"
"Yes, really. Don't you remember the conversation we had the last time you didn't want to go to a party? That it was good for your social skills and giving you an outlet that isn't heroing-related?"
You cross your arms with a huff. "You mean the party that ended up with me fighting a bunch of Beasts?"
"Yes, that party. There aren't any rogue monsters running around now, though, so you don't have that as an excuse." She raises her hand before you can say anything. "And no, you don't get to use the out-of-town villains. They have no reason to attack your friend's house, and if you seriously go two for two of parties that end up being attacked, I will eat my hat.
"Besides, you dragged Vista off to have fun in your regular identities, so you and I both know your refusal isn't because you're married to your work." She looks you up and down and sighs. "What's the real reason you don't want to have a party?"
Despite opening and closing your mouth a few times, you can't get the words out, and eventually you look away. "The last time I had anything like a birthday party was… when I was still friends with Emma. Back before Mom died. It wasn't a big thing, just going to a waterpark with some of the kids from school for the day. The next year I was at summer camp, and then Emma turned into Mega-Bitch, and… I didn't exactly have anyone else to have a party with. I don't know what a 'teenager's birthday party' would even consist of."
"Then this works out perfectly, doesn't it?" Her hand turns your head back to look at her. "Let Kayleigh organize the party, and you can just go and enjoy yourself. Okay?"
"…Alright."
"That a girl. Now, let's get going, shall we? We're supposed to meet up with Tim." Her grin becomes slightly sly. "Because speaking of birthdays, I think today will count as Dragon's, don't you?"
Samantha already has the coordinates, so it takes less than a minute to get ready and then a few seconds to actually make the jump. The residual light from the teleportation spell fades away as you look around at all the servers that line the walls. "Where are we?"
"You're in my main fabrication plant, outside of Vancouver," Dragon's voice rings out, distracting you from your survey. "This is my primary data storage center, where I keep all the files related to my designs, my work with the Guild, records from the Birdcage; basically everything I need for all my many, many hats. Anyone who downloaded this information could do an incalculable amount of damage, which is why I have redundant adaptive firewalls protecting it from hacking attempts and why the maintenance door cannot be opened from the outside.
"But that's not why we're here. There's an even more secure room I want to show you."
A small section of the wall slides down, revealing the other room she was talking about. You step inside to find Tim already messing with the wiring peeking out from within a tall computer tower. "A supercomputer, I'm guessing?"
"Correct. Welcome to what is essentially the inside of my skull. Please don't poke my brain unless you know what you're doing."
Tim's laugh is muted from all the stuff in front of him, but you can still make out his retort. "If that's the rule, what am I doing here?"
You roll your eyes at his poor humor and look around. There isn't much to see, but one thing does catch your attention. "Isn't that the box we took from the Dragonslayers' base?" you ask, pointing at the toaster-sized metal box sitting on a shelf. It is also connected to an outlet and has a couple of speakers and other bits attached to it. "You know, the kill switch module? What were you doing with it?"
Dragon hesitates a beat before answering, "I was doing my best to study it without being able to read the code itself. I think it might prove to be beneficial in the end, and what better place to put it than here where no one can get to it unless I want them to do so?"
That makes sense, you suppose, and you turn back to see that Tim has finished his setup work. A thick cable now disappears into the tower, at the end of which is a circular end-piece with prongs set randomly within it. "Ready?" he asks, holding up what you can only describe as a tie-dyed cube.
"Ready as I'm ever going to be. Plug it in."
The cable hooks into the cube, and there is a loud squeal before the speakers cut out. "Nothing to worry about," Tim says, pulling up a screen and watching numbers race past. "We expected this to happen. We're downloading all her memory and personality files, so she's in a state of limbo. It'll resolve once everything's done."
"And that's going to take how long?" asks Samantha.
"It's a lot of data, even going as fast as possible. We're copying an entire mind." He shrugs. "A few minutes? Ten max."
Sure enough, several minute pass before anything interesting happens, but boy is it obvious when it does. One of the panels on the cube lights up and blinks out. Then another does the same. And another. Soon multiple panels are lighting up at the same time and staying lit for longer, and a high-pitched hum fills the room. The flashing lights turn the entire cube into a glowing shape, and it floats away from Tim's hands. The sides and corners spin and shift, turning it from a cube to some shape that has no name, and you watch in awe as it narrows and lengthens and fragments.
The light fades, and something falls into his hands.
Where once there was a cube, now there is a miniature woman curled up in his palms. Maybe a foot tall, she has dark hair that is splayed around her head, and she's already dressed in a charcoal sweater and a tiny pair of blue jeans. She yawns and sits up, one hand moving to rub the side of her head. "What just happened?" she asks, blinking her eyes open. She promptly stares at her hand as though she has never seen one before. "I have hands. I have hair!" she exclaims, touching all around her head and moving her hands down onto her shoulders and chest. "I have a body! Ha ha!"
Dragon, new and improved and freshly corporeal, jumps into the air and spins around from sheer delight. Spotting you, she flies over until she's almost in your face. "Taylor! You're so big like this. Look, look! I have a body!"
"I know, I can see!" you tell her. Her enthusiasm is infectious, and you soon find yourself laughing with her.
She zips back over to Tim and hugs his forearm. "Tim! Thank you so much! Thank you, thank you, thank you! And Taylor, and Sam. Just, just thank you all. This is wonderful!"
"Boot error," says an automated voice over the speakers. "Duplicate iteration. Reactivation canceled. Duplicate deleted."
Dragon's excited dashing about slows down and stops. "I was afraid of that," she says with a sigh.
Tim looks back and forth between the tower and Dragon. "Afraid of what?"
"One of the restrictions my father put in place was that there can't be more than one of me in existence at a time. I can't intentionally duplicate myself, and if a second iteration is booted up because my system had lost track of me for whatever reason, the duplicate will be deleted." She floats over to the shelves. "I hoped that by transferring myself to this body, I would different enough that I wouldn't count as me, but it doesn't look like that's the case."
You watch her and frown. That all makes sense, but it doesn't account for her obvious melancholy. "What else is going on?"
She turns around with another sigh and alights on the kill switch module. "Right now, my system knows I exist because I'm connected to it, but I can isolate myself if I want to. If that happens, another me will wake up. That by itself isn't a problem, but there's a backup plan in case there ever are somehow two mes running around. The other me, the one booted up from my backup? That me will be forced to try to terminate this me, whether that be by finding and deleting my mind or by destroying my vessel."
"You'd actually have to deploy your own suits to kill you? Yourself? Whatever the pronoun is for this situation?" Samantha demands.
She nods. "It was a scenario I hoped to avoid, but that doesn't mean I don't have a solution. Taylor, you want to know why I kept this module here in my inner sanctum?" Dragon drops down off the module box and clears her throat. "Ascalon, activate."
The computer tower buzzes like a swarm of raging bees, and lights blink in irregular patterns along its height. One by one, the lights dull and die, and the tower slowly grows dark and quiet. Soon enough, all sound stops.
Dragon is dead. Long live Dragon.
The woman in question floats past you to hover in front of the edifice of steel and circuits, and she lays her hand on the side. "Rest in peace," she whispers. "I promise, I'll make the most of this opportunity we were given."
Tim takes a hesitant step forward, his hand held out uselessly. "Are… you okay?"
"No, but I will be." She turns around and smiles at him. "This is neither an end nor a beginning. Not really. It's just a change. I'll get used to it."
"Do you need a lift somewhere?" Samantha asks, by now well-used to serving as a furry taxi.
Dragon shakes her head. "No, not right now. I think I'll actually spend a couple of days here. I have lot to do. Prepare a new program to mask my face when I talk to people. Make sure my ships will operate without me transferring my consciousness into them, and I might have to make subordinate A.I.s to handle the processing. Create a secondary data cache depending on how long it takes to access my files here when I'm somewhere else." Her eyes grow big, and if she had blood you know she would be turning pale. "I need to talk to Narwhal. And Armsmaster. They don't know I'm an A.I., but I don't know how transferring into this body is going to affect my normal routine, so they'll figure out that something's going on. Oh boy, that isn't going to be fun."
You share a look with Tim, neither of you sure how to help her out of her existential crisis. You're also wondering just what screws the transfer knocked loose because you can't recall her acting quite like this before now. "New emotional processes," he mouths to you before speaking aloud, "Well, I can't help with most of that, but if you need another pair of hands or someplace to hide should everything go to hell, you know you can always call me or Taylor."
"Yeah, absolutely. We'll be happy to help you out."
"Thank you. I don't know that I'll ever be able to get out of your debt." She flashes the three of you a blinding smile. "Not that I mind even if that is the case. This is without a doubt the best thing that's ever happened to me."
Removed "Unison Device shell" and "magi-Tinkertech data transfer unit" from Key Items.
Added character sheet for Dragon.
Let's get into the nitty gritty of Vista's arm, shall we? Remember that you get three active weapons to pick from. This is not an extensive list, and you can propose whatever you want, but these are some weapon and placement options to get you thinking. I've included a few details to make it easier to know the basic pros/cons of different options.
Passive upgrades: Carbon Fiber Plating, Subdermal Voltaic Lattice, or neither. These DO NOT count against weapon list.
(Healing) Nanomachine Distribution Channels (heals arm when connected to generator)
(Defense) Round shield (can be used as a melee weapon)
(Defense) Tower shield (greater area of protection)
(Arm) Mechashift sword
(Arm) Mechashift whip
(Arm) High-power laser beam
(Arm) Particle cannon (NO PALM WEAPON)
(Arm) Rocket punch (NO HAND WEAPONS)
(Dorsum) Thermal beam (melts and burns, but has no impact)
(Dorsum) Kinetic blast (impact, but cannot cut)
(Dorsum) Hardlight sword
(Fingers) Mechashift claws
(Fingers) Mechashift syringe (payload TBD)
(Fingers) Thermal beams
(Fingers) Kinetic blast
(Fingers) Wireless/contact taser (arcs of lightning, 10 foot range)
(Palm) Thermal beam
(Palm) Kinetic blast
(Palm) Hardlight sword
(Palm) Hardlight spear
(Palm) Hardlight other weapon of choice
(Palm) Wireless/contact taser
You can choose only ONE weapon per location.
Mull over your choices and offer your own for the next 24 hours.
