Summary:The X-folks take a turn at examining and discussing the centipede that was recovered from the Disaster Zone. Log Info:Storyteller: Clockwork |
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Jean has stayed clear of the mechanical creature in the storage unit. She's not really a genius when it comes to these things, and she's been busy with other things lately. But it's been long enough that she felt a need to call some people together and get a look at things. Texts went out and she's at the storage unit, waiting.
When Elmo shows up, he's got his toolbox and a couple of pink deli boxes. "Hey." He upnods at Jean, sets the deli boxes down on a handy surface. Inside one is several knish, inside the other is rugelach. Why not bring high-carb food to hanging out/dissecting robots with your new friends? Then he's hyperfocused on the robot thing, grinning. He flips open his toolbox, starts rummaging around to find the things he wants. "Okay, so, I actually saw another one a these."
Rogue may be on vacation away from the mansion, but she didn't want to miss anything they might find out about the mechanical critter she'd taken such a tiny piece apart of. Dark hair showing more red with time outside in the spring sun is back in a neat braid, over her casual green top, jeans, and favorite pair of non-work boots. She will rush up, flushed just a bit with a sparkle in green eyes. "Sorry if I'm late. Been runnin' around the city." There's a lightness to her step, her voice, that had been lacking when they'd come upon the thing.
The last person to show up is Zatanna Zatara. Maybe she's being fashionably late? Maybe she just got stuck in traffic. She offers no explanation either way as she strolls up to the group, all smiles, pulling a roller case behind her. "Hope the fun didn't start without me," she says.
Zatanna shrugs out of her black leather motorcycle jacket (is that a Scott thing?) and is now in her working clothes: black knee-high boots, black jeans, and a baggy black tank top such that one can see the bands of her black bra over her ribs. The front of the tank top is an advertisement for something or other called 'SISTERS OF MERCY.' "Let me know what specifically I can do. Otherwise I'm going to get a few wards going just to keep things from getting out the door." She winks, and with a snap of her fingers, the roller bag tips over and opens itself, revealing what looks like the entire prop department for some kind of movie about witchcraft. "Do I smell knish?"
"You saw another one?" Jean quirks a brow at Elmo as she opens up the storage unit and lets everyone in. "Like…wandering free? Or someone else had one that you were looking at?" She takes up a post by the door, ready to welcome others in or cover for them if needed. Rogue's lighter mood brings a flicker of a smile to her features as she waves the other mutant inside. "No worries. I don't think the robot had any appointments. Heya, Zee," she greets with another smile, head tilting as she watches the magic show start. "Thanks."
Elmo, kneeling on the concrete floor by the robot, looks up with a lopsided smile for Zatanna. "Hey, Zee. You doin' okay?" He jerks his head at the deli boxes. "Knish. Got potato and onion, and beef and kasha. I dunno if anybody's vegetarian or anything. Rugelach too. Mexican chocolate."
He looks at Rogue, who he doesn't know, and then back at Zee (and her visible bra), and then at Jean, and then it clearly dawns on him that he's the only guy here in a storage unit full of beautiful women. "Uh," he says, going kinda blank. What were they talking about? What is he doing? Where's Scott? Why is Scott abandoning him to shoulder the awkward load all alone? "…I took another one apart! It was fulla surveillance stuff!"
Rogue will move to take up a lean against a wall, hands sliding into her jean pockets. "Hi." She'll offer to Elmo, those deep green eyes alight with merth at his sudden awkwardness. "Jeannie, who is your friend?" She will look at the redhead, before one brow will arch as green eyes meet Jeans for a silent moment of thunder. "Zee." She will breezily greet, before she's looking at Elmo again. "I only took apart a tiny section where the little Doozer bits lived. Fascinating frame and build up, really."
Zatanna squats down by her open roller-case to start rummaging through it. When Elmo mentions that the thing was full of surveillance stuff, she looks over her shoulder and crinkles her nose a bit. "God. That's creepy." Then she turns back to her bag and takes out what appears to be some kind of… humanoid creature's mummified hand and a jar of… black… stuff…? and uses the hand's extended index and middle fingers to paint the black stuff on the walls near the entrance, tracing elegant hieroglyphs in a language that probably requires Doug to identify on sight. "This'll come right off with soap and water later. But, uh… try not to bump up against any of these or smear them or anything while we're at it. You alter one brushstroke and the meaning totally changes. Which… can sometimes be extremely bad."
|ROLL| Elmo +rolls 1d20 for: 10
"Oh, sorry Rogue!" Jean exclaims, scrubbing a hand over her face and turning a rueful smile toward Elmo's awkward. "I forgot who knew who. Rogue, this is Elmo. He helped out with the generator at the community center in Mutant Town. Elmo, this is Rogue. She's one of our more mechanically-inclined folks. She's the one who's started our explorations on this thing."
Jean makes no pretense that she has even the first clue about how these machines work, but she takes one looooong step away from the nearest symbol when Zee paints them. "Okay. Change magic make bad. Noted. No touchy." She's just surrounded by things that are out of her element at the moment. "Uh, you said surveillance, Elmo? And idea where it was sending all that?"
Elmo blinks at Jean. He looks at the parts on the wall (missing from the robot), looks back at Rogue. "…I…assumed Scott did that." He cringes over his own chauvinism. "And you wouldn't have known if I hadn't just said…sorry. Sorry! I'm a jerk, hi, nice to meet you. Look, don't let me barge in here, if you want to get your hands on this. I already got one." Zee's ritual stuff draws his attention, but he loses interest after a second when he sees none of it's got circuit boards or gears. "Don't touch, got ya, Zee."
"Uh, yeah," he goes on to Jean, flushing, "nothing mic'd for sound, but dozens of cameras. Live streaming, and—oh, hang on…" Then, despite his offer to let Rogue take over, he's got out a delicate pair of wire cutters and he's digging under the robot's shell. Snip. "And she was still operational, so, yeah. Where she's streaming to, I dunno, I got to get into her system and have a look."
"Stay away from the black magic stuff. Sounds pretty common sense." She will beam at Elmo. "I'm an actual, licensed and certified mechanic. Nothing against Scott. I'm used to people assuming that I only play in the garage to look like some man's greased up fantasy or something. No worries." There's a hint of a dmile as she watches him flush and squirm. "See, now if I was good with computers, we could I don't know… find some sort of ip thing, ping and dig through VPNs and firewalls and things and Bob's your uncle. But I'm better with a key than a keyboard."
Zatanna finishes her drawings and seems to say to that mummified hand, quietly: "Thanks, buddy." Maybe it's better not to ask about that one. She files them away in the roller case and then turns back toward the group. "Okay. If that thing turns back on, it's not gonna be able to get out the door. Or through the walls or the floor, for that matter." She glances over at Rogue, and thinks for a second after she of the peroxide streak has her say. Zee folds her arms, purses her lips, and: "…so, wait, it had video, but no audio… did either of you find anything in there for like… sensors…? I mean, why would it be wired for video but not to record sound? I gotta figure it's LOOKING for something, so I'm putting my chips on there being something in there to, like… seek out… whatever it's seeking out. Like even just a geiger counter or SOMETHING…"
Jean winces when Elmo mentions 'still operational.' "Well, I'm glad we didn't take it back home," she says, rueful. "And frankly that it wasn't wired for sound. I don't like that they'd have picked up even that much about us." She crosses her arms over her chest, shifting her weight nervously from one foot to another. "Unfortunately, I just do people brains. Machine brains, not so much. But if they were watching things…I dunno. I feel like if they were official and watching things, they wouldn't need to be invisible. Are you sure the cameras are actually transmitting somewhere and it's not…I don't know, all the cameras are just part of the retro-reflective-ness thingy?" Technical terms here.
Elmo blushes harder as Rogue talks about both how skilled she is and how she just expects guys like him to assume she isn't. Good one, Rosencrantz. He clears his throat. "Yeah, uh, s'my plan. Probably goes through some proxies and whatevah. Anyway, my guess is that it was built for space exploration. Don't need microphones in space. But it don't got anything to take or store samples either, which I'd expect. So my guess maybe ain't as good as it could be." He nods to Jean, eyebrows wry. "Oh yeah. It's definitely transmitting. Good news is this one didn't have power, but I clipped the power supply just in case."
He gives in to his urges and starts taking the thing apart, using a curious little tool he's made. It goes VVVVVRRRRRR like a dentist's drill. "Retroreflective camouflage, yep, it projects the images it gets on its shell," which he taps, "and it makes it kinda see-through in a way. Tough to spot. The cameras don't gotta stick to one thing at a time, they can do both."
"Well, with all the little builder parts in there hopping in and out, not to mention the reflective tech that it used to hide in plain sight, maybe audio just…doesn't work for it. Too much other things to interfere, be it signal wavelength wise, or noise?" Rogue suggests, before Elmo is getting way more techie than she has the pay grade for. "So why have something that can repair itself to explore somewhere uninhabitable, if it can't tell you anything but what the place looks like and what else might live there? It would need sensors of air makeup, and temperatures, other than just the soil and water samples, right?"
Zatanna continues listening, though like Jean, the mechanical engineering stuff is out of her comfort zone entirely, unless it turns out that the centipede is made entirely of handcuffs and leg irons. "Must be something in the Zone that someone REALLY wants," Zatanna adds.
"Or else someone is just…using it to test these things out?" Jean looks to Elmo and Rogue, quirking a brow. "I mean, I guess it's more interesting than sending your robots out to the desert somewhere. Better test for potential other lifeforms that might not appreciate your presence? And hey, a lot cheaper than shooting up a rocket to other planets to test them out, I guess."
Elmo tips a hand back and forth in that classic Yiddish gesture of 'eeeeehhhhhh'. "You can get a lot of data from the colors of stuff, so it depends on what you want to know. Of course, she wouldn't need all this fancy camouflage if she wasn't sneaking around where someone could see, too. And, she can climb like hell." He wiggles one of the many legs. "Doesn't need microgravity for that. The DZ's a pretty good alien environment to test stuff like this out in, I gotta agree." Shrugging at Rogue, he says, "I mean, anything's possible, right? But most of the parts in here are custom. Someone spent a lot of money putting her together. Serial numbers, too, so somewhere there's a factory. They picked what was most important, and it wasn't samples." He stands up—and shoots a sudden guilty look at Zee, and gets very busy messing with his toolbox.
Rogue nods, looking at Elmo, before she will take a step over and peer down towards his toolbox. She's just a little curious what bits and bobs he may have that she may be interested in asking him about. "True. It's a long way from here to the nearest desert, and you'd have to drive or charter a flight. Those ain't fittin' in carry-on."
Zee catches the look Elmo gives her, but is more confused by it than anything else. She puts it aside in the 'can ask about later' bin. "So are we sure yet that we're not, like, fucking with proprietary SHIELD technology and about to get black-bagged into some rendition site?" She rests her hands on her hips, pauses a beat, and then says: "I mean, someone's got to say it."
"SHIELD was there when we picked this one up," Jean shakes her head to Zee. "They were as lost as we were about it. So it's not them. I mean, it could be them, and it could be such a deep op that the agent who was there didn't know about it, but it doesn't seem likely." She purses her lips, thinking it through. "Testing for extraterrestrial exploration is a pretty best case scenario, though. Even for me." And everyone knows Jean sees the best in things. "No reason they would have attacked us if that was their purpose, right?"
Elmo's toolbox has a few normal-seeming tools in it, and a whole lot of weird custom tools whose purpose is murky at best. And batteries. A lot of batteries. None of which actually appear to be in anything that needs power. Elmo grimaces at Zee. "Probably?" he hazards. "Hell, maybe this is some kinda thing like on them nature documentaries, where they put the robot rock next to the lions so they can observe 'em. Whoa, they attacked you? I didn't know. …What'd they attack you with?"
"I'm with the Jean bean on this one. SHIELD was there, and got radioed while we were there. If it was somethign they had a hand in, I'm sure something would have come from it before now." She glances from the toolbox to Elmo, then to Zee, then back to Elmo. "Themselves. One came right at me, right Jean? I was just walking down the middle of the street. I uh.. leave supplies there sometimes for those that need them."
Zatanna frowns. "It's a shame you can't do seances for gizmos," she says, mostly to herself. "Okay, so. Not SHIELD. Lots of video. No audio, no sample collection. Sensor status, uh, indeterminate pending Elmo and Rogue poking around more. Attacking people. I feel like the more we add to the picture here, the more we can narrow down a, like, educated guess as to what it's DOING. I still think there's gotta be something it's searching for, but even if it's just trying to keep people away, that still begs the question of, uh, why."
Jean ruffles a hand through her hair, letting out a huff of breath. "Well. At least it's not attacking us now. And yeah," she adds to Elmo. "Came right at Rogue and a couple others, all…snappy in the mouth and the like. And repaired itself as it was damaged, which is fine and all, except that its whole goal seemed to be destruction, so…"