You know, me and gig wrote this huge thing over PM's about how our characters met, and never posted it.
Medulla remembers everything-quite literally. Her files cover everything she hears, sees, and tastes in real time high definition-as a scientific vessel, information is the blood in her veins, her reason for existence.
This is one of the files she has assigned some lateral importance to-for no reason we here at Ganymedean Biolabs can understand, since it contains no obvious scientific merit, unless you count the somewhat intriguing construction of those improvised explosive devices the Remnant used. One notes she's gone to lengths to clean up the audio from the previously questionable translations, into it's present more readable form, for anyone who doesn't speak Remnant-argot. There are also some purely thematic flourishes, her attempts at giving the memory some sort of literary definition, by explaining the motivations involved. Medulla #3 was always apt to such saccharine outbursts of emotion, with an air of the dramatic-all things we should consider with our ongoing construction of Medulla #4.
...
"That was rude."
The explosive had been unexpected, to be sure. Who would had thought some violent tribal would have mined the clifftop?
Medulla-3 frowned at her attacker. Two of Medulla's arms was removed, and most of her buried under fifty tons of tock. She had her head free, and that was it. She'd retracted her head in time, but her front arms were now somewhere else. It didn't seem like she could dig herself out.
She debated trying to poison the errant tribal, but though against it. After all, she wasn't getting out of here on her own. Her brains communed among themselves. Medulla had come here to eat one of the high priests, since it believed they might soon die of a plague. ...Worth a shot.
"Tell me..." Her baby-blue eyes looked at her attacker. They saw the faint, telltale red rash on the cheeks and neck, vivid against the ashen grey. "You're sick, aren't you. Miss."
The woman in turn was silent for a moment.
She well covered in a half-face mask, and body covering light-absorbing cloak, but her disdain was ill-disguised. Her own eyes are also blue, but so light as to almost be white-they show only a short of existential boredom. Her bolt gun-a primitive, yet effective weapon that fired blunt metal rods on a magnetic rail at high speeds-motioned in the direction of the machine-mongrel she had trapped, though unintentionally so.
She had been looking to catch some local off-world water-pirates who had been camping at the top of Mt. Micsoof, but had caught some sort of weird machine-thing...she began talking to the being, to pass the time from trying to pry some parts of it that were scattered about...
"...Sick and dyin', mo-foi-fem, but ain't we all? Sick of life, dying from death. Blessings be, upon Kurn, aight-she-who raises us up, and to cast us down.
Allway's, can you snapsnap, and cycle out? I don't got all day, les-fem-pard. It's not a personal act, minding you-I figure yer not a God-crocked water-bucc (those Gods little fishes whom my net was cast for), so it's more a waste of my 'ploders-true true-than, any a desire for harm upon yours. Tho harm be done, I was merely using the fat lot of them, 'afore I leave this here place on a journey of greatest portent.
Anyway, you need help cycling out? A real toughie-machine-mongrel, you? I could just det the rest of the ploders after I'm done! You'd be buried under Kurns great and mighty bosom, for all the rest of time." She finished mildly, now slightly interested in viewing this potential explosion. "Granted, that'd be quite a spectacular thing to watch, and quite a quick thing to experience. Well, you go and be free with your words, you metal-thing. I'll keep my hands busy-idle fingers do evil unto Kurn..." Brooklyn said, picking up some long loops of snake-like-cables (formerly part Medulla's own atmospheric filters) and stowing them in her kitbox with the ease of a patient scavenger.
The bioroid coughed delicately. Oh, the unconventional dialects! Raised with the precise language in the labs, it was almost offensive to her ears. She told her supervisor than she required a partner for these sorts of things.
"I do say I'd prefer not to be buried. Death isn't quite so attractive when I'm not yet sure of the other side." Nictating membranes briefly wiped the bioroid's eyes free of dust.
"Surely, you know the Holy Word of Kurn." Brooklyn says blandly, no doubt about to give you a full education. One gets the idea she's been getting plenty of that.
"...Kurn made from herself 62 Worlds around her Holy orbit, and each World would contain both a Garden of High Sanctity for the Blessed, and a Deeper Ruined-Hell for those she curses. Machine-mongrels go to Jarnsaxa, where they must suffer for their sins-to act as the pillars, upholding the Rainbow Bridge to Asgardia, who welcomes all the noble warriors home...." She prattled on, picking up a long flat piece of metal that was once part of the Bioroids shell.
"...Still, Miss Primitive, I'm not likely to "cycle out", as you so quaintly put it. I was built far tougher than that. You, however, I imagine lack the precision bioengineering of Ganymede. To suffer from diseases... it's fatal, isn't it? I know of your bloodburn a little -" a barbaric name, to be sure "And I know I'm going to last longer than you are. Unless, perhaps, you get a cure. Not something you'll find with your water-buccs, is it?"
"...As for the Bloodburn, all have said there is no cure. Truly, be it the long withheld vengeance of Gods-Crocked Earther-scum (may they boil in Mimas's puddles of burning-grease-fires for all the many eternities), or the bone-deep loathing of our ancient forebears, or a curse laid upon us by Holy Kurn herself-or the multitudes of vengeance crying dead, who daily reach clawed hands from deep watery grave to proclaim their spite upon us, those fat lot of whiny corpsers laying lazily dead! They say, for our many and varied multitude of sins, there is no hope for us. Yet one as me, must find that cure, see? The cure that there not be.
Killing water-buccs is not a relief, but those who die mean our geyser miners run unblemished-and such supplies as we trade, bring the currency needed for the Balme of Gilad (what you off worlders call KMI-670), which eases the worst of brain-fevers and stills the hand-tremors."
She poked the biodroid with a long metal pole idly.
"If you won't cycle out, maybe you can stay here forever and forever. And, once Brooklyn lazes down to die in her time, and all her people too, and the water is no more fit to drink-why, you can circle round and round and round under Kurn's wrathful gaze-in a a small dead world empty of sound, peopled by the small dead folken who never mattered to anyone nohow, with these oceans of water not no longer fit to drink by man or critters. Abandoned by all men and women for all time, and the only God around to pray to, does so hate your steel-innards! It's quite a poetical end, if you ask me." She comments.
"Stop calling me a machine. I'm no walking bucket of bolts - I'm a bioengineered organism. My innards are a mixture of brains, digestion and processing chambers, and production modules."
The bioroid looked at the savage, and smiled.
"You say there's no cure, but there's always a cure, with sufficient brains behind it. And Ganymede has brains aplenty, my dear... in bodies and tanks both. If you help me dig out of this miserable rock - feed me and I'll dig out myself - you won't have to cycle out with that disease of yours, my girl. Perhaps not at all, if the fancy takes you - I'll not know of age beyond as a number. Don't you want to be stronger, faster, smarter?"
"...Alright, so you're a machine with touchy feelings." Brooklyn said, continuing to poke. "And, that sounds like a swell deal. Of course, now I go-"And how can I trust ye?" and you go "You've got no other choice." and I go "Well, alright, what do I have to lose!", and somehow we end up friends for life, or maybe you up and killed me-like the story of the mechorpion and the froggit crossing the channel, who stunged the one who picked her up, at the cost of her own life. 'You knews what I was when you picked me up', she say, what a bugger of this life I says-because, you'd wait to sting me, till you were across the channel. I figure you're pretty smart.
That about covers the basics, I reck.
...Anyway, don't call my rocks miserable. I mean, this place IS miserable, but they're my rocks. I live here, and I won't have you begrudging my den."
*poke poke poke*
"Question, highly ironic in light of a previous statement-you have any way off of this here rock? So'luck you, I was merely divested from home. So, finding transportation is a bit difficult, as of those who seem to not be keen to let us off this place-afraid of plague and all, though we know it seeminghow passes through the vacuum (Most says through the water, you ken), so either it's just us who have it, or it can get you no matter where you are. No'thing lest else, holds me here any longer...I am well and truly alone.
...I'll trade you a million billion miles on your star-flying ship (I assume you have one), for this here one shovelful of miserable rock. Also, you gotta promise to make me Queen of Sol and all her worlds, and blow up that bugger-world of Earth, while we're at it....I'd also like a Amburga, and slide of Frieze, with a janilly milkquake in tall grass...to gooooo...
...See, I know how to haggle!" She said, smiling in the near-universal human mode of smugness. She does in fact, cease poking and taps a panel on the rod-the head expands into a shape like a shovel. She being inclined to help anyway because potential death by Biodroid is preferable to certain Bloodburn induced psychosis and-at best-a long ride on a black wagon, and a miserable half existence in a buccden.
"Also, don't talk to me about that far-flung future. Maybe I'll live forever, but right now I'd die in five handspans if my atmospheric recycler gives out. Around here, you don't do much thinking, right? You can think yourself right into a big hole in the ground, or maybe just step on a big pack of 'ploders that was right in front of your bio-nose or whatever..." She said, beginning to remove rocks at a good clip.
"You've made a wise choice.... if you stick to it, my darling."
She unhinged her jaw and her tendrils emerged, delicately moving away small rocks, uninhibited with her voice as she continued to speak.
"And yes, I have a way off this delightful little habitat. A contractor, paid in biomods to cart me around for a while, but after that it's my own way. Blame my overseer, I suppose, but what can you do?" She said this in the patient, long-suffering tones of the employee.
"Once we've out in the void, you'll have to do more thinking than hoping for a lucky hit with a landmine. You want a cure? You need to help me in my job, and that's finding delightful minds to pick. Sometimes that's literally, by the way. I hope you don't have a weak stomach?"
"Me' guts been fortified, sure to say...
And, that's about what I figger. My people don't let anything go to waste, eitherways. You get the brains, I can use the other bits. Not exactly to eat, but I can always use the water-and who could turn down a free aug or two? Even if you have to pull it out of some Buccs ugly head." She says, nodding to herself.
The alabaster head smiled.
"Now you've got the spirit of it. I am Medulla-3 - that is, the third Medulla model bioroid from the Ganymedean Biolabs. What's your designation, my honey?
"They call me Brooklyn of Clan Spyche. Caste-Bloodline Punitive. Don't forget that part."
"Well, then, Brooklyn, of Clan Spyche, Caste-Bloodline Punitive. I do hope this is the beginning of a productive relationship..."
"Hey, we'll sure do be product'ing something, all to rights." Brooklyn said somewhat sadly, squinting up at the hulk of Saturn, looming over them in the darksome sky.
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Topic: Solar: a Transhuman Scifi RPG OOC [Started, waitlist open!] (Read 16717 times)