fandomtownies | Wellspring Arms & Meditation Center, Friday

She might be a little fuzzy.

Moddable Zen.

Pew! Pew!

Can we have nap time today?

Reno peered his head in through the door, a bit of a grin on his lips and his hands behind his back. Sure, he was hiding something.

But the smell of the peanut butter cookies in the bag that he was hiding probably would give that fact away easily enough.

"Didn't sleep last night, or what?"

"Hi, you," she smiled, rubbing her eyes again. "No, I did, I just ... couldn't stay asleep. Petey didn't help. He kept licking my nose. And then I'd wake up and go, okay, Petey, not now, and he'd think it was play time. So that wasn't so hot."

A few blinks, and then a bigger grin. "Heyyyyyyy, what's behind your back?"

Edited 2008-11-07 19:29 (UTC)

Reno smirked and held up the bag of cookies.

"Been a while since I brought you a peanut-butter peace offering, yo. Just for Rikkus, not for Peteys."

"You brought cookies!" Rikku bounced, hopping around the counter. "See? This is why you're an awesome boyfriend. Bribery."

He was totally getting a kiss for that.

Kisses for cookies? Always an acceptable trade!

"When it comes to bribery, I gotta be one of the best, yo," he mused, leaning down to kiss her again while he handed the bag over. "Spent long hours perfectin' the art of it. Would you have it any other way?"

"I thought you spent long hours perfecting the art of something else entirely," Rikku said, her face as innocent as she could possibly manage. "Or is that a bribe? I mean. I'm not complaining, here."

"Hey, I ain't above callin' that a bribe too, if you want to think of it like one." Reno chuckled and gave a shrug of his shoulders. "Whatever makes you happy, zoto. I won't complain."

"Neither will I," she chirped. "I'm the one getting cookies for no good reason. Are they for-no-good-reason cookies? Or were you stopping in for something and brought them along, anyway?"

"Nope. These are totally pointless cookies, yoto." Reno was not nearly as chirpy. But that was a Reno thing. He was still grinning. "Missed you, decided to harass you at work. Brought cookies to sweeten the deal. Ain't nothin' the matter with that, is there?"

"Nope," she grinned. This required a nose-kiss. "You're lucky I didn't use you as a big cushion during chemistry class. I kept nodding off during that movie. I mean, I was trying not to. And it's hard because you're really cozy. Just: hey, Reno's over there, I could curl up and take a nap."

See how she used him, in horrible selfish ways, for her own devious nap-purposes?

"Heeey, I wouldn't've complained," Reno pointed out. "I happen to be a big fan of sleepin' through class. Do it whenever I can get away with it."

... Which wasn't often, in a school like this one.

"Kinda had to pay attention to the movie today, though. I freakin' suck at writin' papers."

"I'm sure you don't," Rikku said quickly. "You always did reports, right? For the Turks? You'd have to be good at them by now. I just ... ramble. And then I forget that I'm way off-topic and can't find my way back again."

"Heh. Reports are all, 'this shit happened,' and 'that shit happened,' and there's a whole bunch of 'and that's why we did this,' tossed in. I don't even pay attention to 'em half the time. Here, Tseng, have some freakin' words, yo."

Reno shrugged and grinned faintly. "And anyhow, I ain't written a report in weeks. Gettin' rusty on somethin' I sucked at in the first place. Freakin' paperwork. How'd your paper go, anyhow? Still workin' on it? So far, I got as far as 'Marie Curie was,' and then my pen died."

"I have a couple paragraphs," Rikku said. "I kept getting fuzzy in class, so I was going to hit the library later and do some extra research. I figured Tyler wouldn't mind, you know? You should come, it'll be great."

Reno was possibly dating a nerd.

"I'm sure it will," Reno agreed, smiling indulgently.

Sometimes, he just wanted to pinch her cheeks.

"I got my doubts that I'd be any good at that kinda thing. Maybe we Google it?"

Google: Reno's best friend.

"Google is good, too," she said. "And Wikipedia. Not as a primary source, because people can vandalize it or mess up the neutral bits? But it gives you a nice overview and then you go found the real story, yeah? I don't know. I just like that we get to write about someone who did nifty science-stuff."

"See, maybe I ain't excited about this assignment 'cause my knowledge of people who did 'nifty science stuff' is pretty much exclusively about all the freaks that ever wandered Gaia."

Hojo, actually, was the whole of Reno's experience with nifty science guys.

He wasn't even going to go there.

Edited 2008-11-09 06:32 (UTC)

"That's not entirely true," she said, binking his nose with her fingertip. "Unless you extend it to 'plus this hot girl who liked to blow things up.' I'm already starting on my science project, for the fair. Did you hear there's gonna be a fair? I don't know how I'm gonna pull it off, but it's gonna be awesome if I can."

"I had no idea there was gonna be one of those, yo." Reno wrinkled his nose a little, crossing his eyes to look at her finger. "You're already startin' on somethin', huh? What you got in mind, Hot Girl Who Likes to Blow Things Up?"

"Defense system," Rikku said smoothly. "I'm trying to see if I can incorporate Caritas's no-violence spell with some sort of alarm system, and those droids I had for last class, the patrol ones? The kinda thing where, if we get some sort of large-scale invasion, we'd have an early heads-up for it, and a first line of defense."

She shrugged. "It's kind of mixing magic and mech at the moment and I'm not sure exactly if it's going to turn out, at all."

"I still owe you a ShinRa droid, don't I? For, like... Uh. Your birthday."

Wow, Reno failed at boyfriend.

"I'm gonna have to light a fire under Rude's ass and get him to scrounge one up, yo. I bet there's a way to incorporate that kinda tech into this plan of yours, if you can get your hands on it. I mean, those ShinRa bots were programmed to not target the citizens, yoto."

He paused, frowning thoughtfully. "They kinda had issues with members of SOLDIER, though. Somethin' about mako or Jenova cells or some junk. They'd need tweaks, that's for damn sure."

"It's okay," she shrugged. "Shinra's kind of a mess right now, isn't it? It's gotta be hard to get one together. And I doubt that President-guy really wants you taking those and mailing them all over the place."

She considered. "You had mako-treatments, didn't you?" she asked. "So if you set off the droid, I could tinker with it, and then know that it was okay again when you didn't set off the droid."

She was completely in tech mode, yes.

"Eh, to hell with Rufus, anyhow. I had enough of those damn droids come after my slightly radioactive mako-enhanced ass, I figure I earned one, yo." He shrugged his shoulders and considered. "But, you know, if you putz around with it enough that it don't come after me, you'd still have to make sure that it does work on other shit. We could take it for a field-trip somewhere, if you wanna make sure it works. Set it loose on some monsters or somethin', make sure it don't try to off the teal deer. That kinda thing."

"Tyler also mentioned ... you know. Keeping it with instructions handy won't help if it attacks someone who's a kid and can't read, or an animal. I'd have to be careful with this, you know? I really don't want anyone injured because we set up a defense system wrong."

She was still chewing her lower lip. "What if ... it was one of those mech-droids without weapons? To patrol, I mean. And someone would have to sign off on sending out the weapon ones, if there's an invasion. The standard droids, they're just there to record and notify of any abnormal behavior."

"Now there's an idea," Reno agreed. "I mean, havin' armed ones all tuned up could come in handy if somethin' bad does go down, but somethin' that'll check in, maybe with video or somethin' of what's goin' on... that could be worth a whole damn lot, yo."

Rikku grabbed a sheet of paper and was now scribbling things down quickly.

"GPS tracker," she said. "Camera, always on, streaming feed. Recorded somewhere safe, and let's say every week or so, the tape records over itself. Violence sensor. If something trips it, the info is flagged when it gets to the storage area and an alarm goes out. Discreet, low-key, at least the first alarm. It could be two squirrels throwing down, or someone sparring in an alleyway."

She was sketching out lines, here and there, the shape of the patrol droid, the pathways that would cover the island. "So the alarm is tripped, and someone has to go look at the feed. Maybe it's kept in the trooper station, and whoever is on duty takes a peek at whatever camera just got flagged. If it's nothing, whoever-it-is flips a switch and the alarm gets shut down. If it's major, the trooper has a handy button for putting out an SOS: we're under attack. And maybe there's some kind of ... setting where if you get three or four minor alarm-trips all at the same time, the system assumes something huge is up unless you specifically override it not to."

"That'd make sense. I mean, you don't get assaults all over the map at once unless somethin' big is goin' on. ShinRa'd have security setups like that. Different alert levels. And, unless it's an inside job, it used to work real damn well."

Reno, who had nearly been crushed by a freaking elevator because he was being an idiot during one such alarm, knew this first-hand.

"It means you gotta have someone around all the time to watch the system. But I don't think anyone would argue. I mean, between stone angels and the old vice-principal and Nemesis, it ain't like we don't got good reason to be paranoid, here."

"That was why I was thinking the Troopers," she said, frowning over her paper and adding more furious scribbles in the margins. "If anyone around here is on-call in the wee hours, I'd think it would be them, right? And we could have the patrol droids as a constant, with the ass-kicker ones set aside until or unless someone taps the button to say, go to it. Which still doesn't mean they wouldn't bump into an innocent bystander, but if we're in the middle of a full-scale invasion ..."

She tapped her pencil against the desk, still thinking.

"What kind of inside job?" she asked, idly.

"If we're in the middle of a full-scale invasion, the ones who can't handle themselves better be inside anyhow, yo," Reno agreed with a shrug. And then he tilted his head for a moment, considering.

"ShinRa had a breach, once, that was a guy from SOLDIER and a guy who was booted offa the science department. Was one hell of a mess, droids and shit all over the place, terrorizin' the staff. And, I mean, not all the staff was Turks an' SOLDIER an' infantry, you know? There were the scientists and the paper-pushers, too. They came in to get somethin', and they ripped hell outta the place while they did it. Wasn't until later we found out, the guy who was in charge of SOLDIER at the time was in on that shit, too. Dunno how long he was up to that. Maybe it happened as soon as Rufus made Vice-President. Wouldn't shock me none. Could happen here, is all I'm sayin'. I mean, Hades. That was an inside job, too, zoto."

"You're right," she said, looking up and frowning. "So how do you guard against that, if you can't trust anyone? I mean, whoever's getting the signal can override. Inside job could be anyone pulling the strings. I'm not sure how you fix that, you know?"

She tapped her pencil against the same spot on the papers, shaking her head. "No. I mean. It's too easy to go, they should've been inside. Maybe they were trying to get inside and got attacked. Sic-ing some crazy droids on them won't help, and could end up hurting innocent people. That's not much of a defense system, zoto."

Reno frowned and nodded his agreement. "How's the security ward on Caritas work, anyhow? It ain't just violence, that sets it off, is it? Sounds kinda simple when you get down to it. But maybe if there's some kinda magic that can differentiate between the intent behind it... I dunno. Might be pretty big, but there's plenty of magic-types here on the island, too. Maybe it could happen. That way, people out to defend their home, or people who are fightin' for their lives, here, they're safe, and whatever's out there with malicious intent, that kinda thing, they're the ones that get honed in on. That'd be somethin' to look into settin' up if there are armed droids. Maybe for now, it'd be a safer plan to just look into settin' up surveillance and alarms, yeah?"

"Yeah," she nodded. "And the spell at Caritas seems pretty specific. No violence, but it's not like ... uh. I mean. Some people go have kinky time in the bathrooms, and that doesn't set it off. So it can't just be -- y'know. It has to be measuring intent, somehow. I wish I knew more about that spell. But even at that, you get messiness, too. If the attack-droid knows to go zap anybody who's being violent, then -- let's say some guy gets attacked by a fiend, and then grabs a tree branch and starts whacking it. The droid might zap him. Too bad you couldn't just have a forced separation, cease and desist sort of deal. And ... yeah. The alarms themselves, I mean, that'd be huge. Wouldn't it? A first warning, that something's coming in, and we'd have video feed of what it looks like and how it acts, and GPS of its location. Not that the island's all that big, but you wanna be sure, right?"

"You do," Reno agreed. And then chewed his lip in thought. "There was another guy, worked for ShinRa. Goes by the name of Reeve. Wasn't so big on the thought of hurtin' people either, when it came down to it. Probably wasn't all right in the head. He's runnin' the WRO now, anyhow. But he made this ... weird-ass droid thing. Operated it remotely. Worked through it, you know? Turks got to work with it once. I mean, not me. I got better things to do with my time than play with a remote-controlled cat thing. But somethin' like that might work, too. Once there's a need to send out armed droids, there ain't no reason they can't be controlled from a distance either, is there?"

"You can do that?" Rikku said. She considered that for a few seconds, making another note. "But then ... how easy are they to control? Do we want people off in a room directing droids around instead of being on the streets doing it themselves? ... Although ... I guess some of the people who could use the remote-droids, they wouldn't necessarily be fighters, right?"

More notes, now. Completely geeking out, yes.

"Reeve ain't a fighter. He's a builder. He's an organizer. There ain't no reason we can't keep the people who can't fight behind, give 'em a droid and a remote, and tell 'em to go at it while other people research, and other people do the field work, yo." Reno shrugged. He wasn't a researcher, and he didn't need no damn droid. But he could see the appeal, if there was some reason that people couldn't get out there and fight. "The toy this guy had did that, you know? Let him get involved. Had some measure of a personality of its own, I think. Could get in there and take the fall where a real person would'a got killed, and another one would be there to take its place. No real loss. Just a bot."

Wellspring Arms & Meditation Center, Friday

Talk to Rikku

The Meditation Room

The Shooting Range

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