Atlas Gym, Monday (12/2)

[notallbluemonks]

Oh, right. It was that time of the year when minor weird shit happened on a daily basis around here, wasn't it?

Beau had found a fairly sizable chocolate bunny in the closet this morning when she'd gone to get dressed, which was an early clue. Then that trend had continued all the way through her leaving the apartment and stopping at J,GoB for breakfast, so by the time she got to work and had a couple of people flipping out at her because there had been chocolate in their lockers she was at least -- resigned to, if not prepared for, that sort of reaction.

"It's not a weird-ass promotional gimmick, okay? Leave me alone," she grumbled. "The whole damn island's doing this, so just get used to it for the rest of the month."

She'd been collecting chocolate throwing stars all morning, much to her amusement, so she was pretty much fine with today's weirdness. Also nibbling on one right in front of one of the complaining patrons, just to be obnoxious.

[OOC: Gym/post open, please expect SP as work slowly extracts my soul today.]

Comments

[firstofitskind]

It was Monday, and what else were Mondays for but hanging out with pestering Beau at the gym?

Also he had something he needed to give her- and no, it was not chocolate.

“Beauuuuuuuuuuu!” he called out cheerfully as he made his way into the gym, a smallish box about the size of a softball in his hands. “Good morn- is that a chocolate throwing star?” he snickered. “How on-brand.”

[notallbluemonks]

Beau shoved the last of that particularchocolate shuriken into her mouth, shrugged, and then pointed mock-accusingly at Liam.

“You fuckin’ left,” she complained in the slightly forced casual tone of someone who was pretending not to have abandonment issues. “But I guess I can let you off the hook because you A) came back, and B) left me a message first, at least.”

Translation: she was actually really glad to see you, Liam!

[firstofitskind]

“Sorry,” Liam said, grimacing a little because he got it, Beau, why do you think he left that message in the first place? “Some friends needed my help with a thing, and I couldn’t really say no, but-“ he held out the box- not wrapped, just a random repurposed box he’d grabbed from the apartment. “I got you something?”

[notallbluemonks]

“It’s not going to explode or anything when I open it, right?”

She had to ask, okay.

While reaching for the box, looking curious.

[firstofitskind]

Liam rolled his eyes. "No." Which is not to say he wouldn't give her explosives, just that they wouldn't be already armed.

When she opened the box she'd find something dark purple and vaguely spherical. If she picked it up out of the box, it would start to glow with a soft light from within, and feel warm to the touch.

[notallbluemonks]

"Whoa."

Yeah, Beau had in fact reached into the box and taken its contents out, and now she was staring in fascination (it was absolutely a nerdy fascination) at the glow.

"That's, uh." She turned it in her hand, one way and then the other, just examining it from slightly different angles. "I'm not sure what it is? But it's cool."

[firstofitskind]

That nerdy fascination was exactly why Liam had picked out this in particular, yes.

"One of those indentations is a button," he instructed. "It'll feel a little different than the others." If she pressed down on the correct spot, a column of light would appear.

[notallbluemonks]

Sure, Liam. Give her something that was vaguely like a puzzle to solve, why don't you.

Beau immediately got to work searching for the button and somehow, by luck or by rolling a natural 20 keen observation, managed to find it pretty quickly.

"... wow, man," she said, staring up at the column of light. "That's ... that's pretty dope."

[firstofitskind]

It got better! As Beau spoke, a series of symbols appeared in the column, rotating around it slowly.

"It's a lexicon," he explained, snickering a little as he read the translation. "It didn't quite know what to do with 'that's pretty dope', but it got the... general sentiment, more or less."

[notallbluemonks]

“Get the fuck out,” Beau blurted out, looking far too pleased about this for someone who liked to act less intelligent than she was... not that she really bothered with the act around the people she was closest to any more. “Can it do that with any languages?”

[firstofitskind]

Yeah, Liam was here for your secret nerd tendencies, Beau. Which is why as soon as he'd seen the unused data log, he'd known what he wanted to do with it.

"Sort of? The output's all Eunoia, because it's a Taelon device, but it'll take any sort of input."

Although now Liam was considering what sort of programming tweaks it would take to make it output other languages too.

[notallbluemonks]

“So like...” That sneaky grin should worry you, Liam. “If I wanted to teach it how to swear in like five languages...”

[firstofitskind]

Liam just facepalmed, shoulders shaking a little with silent laughter.

[notallbluemonks]

Surely you had to have seen this coming, Liam.

“Dude! Serious question!”

It really was, for all that she had a shit-eating grin going on right now.

[firstofitskind]

"You're supposed to be the one learning from it," Liam pointed out. "But yes, technically, that is a thing you could do."

[notallbluemonks]

“You got me something that would teach me a space language that doesn’t even exist in my world,” Beau said slowly, frowning a bit in a way that might start to make people think she didn’t like it, except for the absolute delight in her voice. “Cool.

[firstofitskind]

"I just figured it might be the kind of thing you'd find interesting, maybe," Liam said with an attempt at a casual shrug. "And if you didn't, well. It looks cool."

[notallbluemonks]

“I can put it on the coffee table like a centerpiece,” Beau agreed, because now she kind of cared about making the apartment feel like home. “It’s multifunctional like that.”

She turned the device over in her hands a couple of times.

“I like it,” she said, more serious now. “You didn’t have to do this, but ... thanks. For real.”

[firstofitskind]

"I know I didn't have to," Liam said. "That's why I did."

[notallbluemonks]

The smile he got from Beau was a little one, but it was easy and sincere and more than a little bit awed.

“Thanks,” she said quietly — yes, she was capable of that.

[firstofitskind]

“You’re welcome,” Liam said, leaning sideways to bump her shoulder with his. The ‘I might have to take off sometimes, but I’m always going to come back’ was unsaid, but implied.

[notallbluemonks]

If only Beau could let herself believe that readily.

She aimed an elbow at his ribs, but lightly. "You do anything extra cool while you were out there?"

[firstofitskind]

“Guess that depends how you define ‘extra cool’,” Liam said, making a face that was exaggerated far out of proportion with how hard her elbow had actually connected.

[notallbluemonks]

Yeah, Beau's face said she wasn't buying it anyway.

"Did you do anything interesting," she said instead.

[firstofitskind]

“Well,” he said slowly, “the whole reason I went out there was because some friends of mine came across a signal that seemed like it might be coming from a Repository Ship- a kind of library, I guess, that my father’s people built to house the knowledge they’d collected for those who sought it and were deemed worthy.”

[notallbluemonks]

Way to go, Liam, that could not possibly have piqued her interest more.

She was slightly more alert now, her eyebrows raised just a touch.

"Was it one?"

[firstofitskind]

"Yeah," he nodded. "Thankfully, unlike the last time I ran into one of those ships, the programming wasn't damaged."

[notallbluemonks]

"There's more of them out there?" It was cute how she kept trying to sound all casual about it. Except wait.

"... hang on, what exactly counts as being deemed worthy of accessing that knowledge?" That was, after all, the source of some of the tension between the Cobalt Soul and the Soltryce Academy.

[firstofitskind]

"My father was about ten million years old when he died," Liam said with a shrug. "And by Kimera standards, that was... just past middle-age?" The 'ten million' being literal and not any sort of exaggeration.

So yeah. There had been, at one point, a lot of those ships out there. Of course, Ha'gel had been the only surviving member of the Kimera race for... a long time, and so who knew how many of those ships actually remained?

"The ship puts you through a series of physical and psychological tests," he explained. "Nothing life-threatening. Or at least, nothing that's supposed to be."

[notallbluemonks]

"Oh." That sounded like the kind of thing she'd do pretty well at -- well, the physical tests anyway. "Not sure how that relates to deserving to know things, but."

She had to digest that whole ten million years old thing.

"... has anybody actually, like, died doing it?"

[firstofitskind]

“Yeah,” Liam confirmed, making a face. “During, uh. My first year. We ran into one whose programming had been damaged. There were a lot of bodies.”

[notallbluemonks]

You know, sometimes you realized you kind of hadn't wanted the answers?

"Oh. Oh, fuck," Beau muttered. "At the library where I used to work, you had to be like chaperoned the whole time by an employee, and I thought that was a little extreme, but fuck, man."

[firstofitskind]

“Yeah,” Liam said with a sigh. “‘Fuck’ about sums it up.”

[notallbluemonks]

Beau turned the lexicon over in her hands a few more times, just sort of running her fingers over all the indentations like she was trying to memorize by feel which one was the switch.

"This one wasn't like that, though, right?"

[firstofitskind]

“Nah,” Liam confirmed. “Totally non-life-threatening.”

[notallbluemonks]

"I mean, obviously, since you're here," Beau said with a light shrug. "So, like, do you always just kinda go, no questions asked, when people need your help with something?"

[firstofitskind]

"... Sure?" Liam said, sounding a little puzzled. He was a far cry from the naivete of his first few weeks of life, but there were some things he still didn't quite understand. Like why anyone wouldn't step in to help someone who needed it, if they had the power to.

[notallbluemonks]

And Beau, on the other hand, didn't understand why anyone would be that willing to risk their own neck for other people all the time. (Give her time, she'd figure it out, but right now? Nope.)

"Just like that?" she asked, sounding just as puzzled. "Like, without really getting a chance to weigh the risks against the rewards or anything?"

[firstofitskind]

"I like having a plan, if that's what you mean," he said slowly.

[notallbluemonks]

"No, I mean, just ..." Beau was sort of slowly becoming aware that this sounded kind of awful of her, and she kicked at the floor a little bit. "You know, stopping to figure out if it's going to be worth it."

[firstofitskind]

To be entirely fair, Liam's whole existence had at one point hinged on the fact that he was a tool to be used for a specific purpose. 'Stopping to figure out if it's going to be worth it' had never been an option, not for him.

"It's always worth it."

[notallbluemonks]

And Beau had ... basically had every attempt she'd ever made to reach out and connect with people thrown back in her face, before she arrived here, so it was hard for her to see it from that perspective.

Which was understandable, right?

But here was Liam, telling her all of this with absolute conviction, and there was Karolina, who always wanted to help, and ... wow, she kind of felt like a petty little asshole in comparison.

"I guess," she said slowly, rather than voice any of that. "I don't know how to be that optimistic, probably."

[firstofitskind]

“Looking out for your own interests isn’t inherently a bad thing,” said the person who was literally seeing a therapist later that afternoon who had to remind him of that fact on a regular basis. Strangely enough it was easier to think of that as applying to other people than to himself.