Town Hall, Wednesday

[weirderthanthou]

Jesse had woken up that morning to sounds that... had kind of felt like hissing to her waking brain. She'd gotten up quickly, but now she was unsettled. They weren't really hisses, the noises. But they were close enough.

So if anyone needed her, she'd be wandering around Town Hall, talking to the plants.

"You're doing so good lately! Your leaves are super perky!"

... you relaxed your way, Jesse relaxed her way.

[[ open! ]]

Comments

[badassprodigy]

And that would be Barry pushing a cart of computer equipment from a bygone era into Jesse's office. "Merry fucking Christmas," he said with a smirk. "You'll never get another fucking fax machine again."

[weirderthanthou]

Jesse was still in the talking-to-plants-zone, so excuse her for saying, "Please excuse his language," to the large fern in the corner before she stretched up.

"What do you have?"

[badassprodigy]

Barry pulled off a large device which looked like a monitor with a keyboard attached to it. "It's a Zenith Z-19 terminal circa 1979 with additional capabilities provided by fucking yours truly," He said proudly. "100% made with components and technology that would bring me to tears if I actually had to use it."

Clearly Barry had no problem swearing in front of plants.

[weirderthanthou]

"That actually looks like something from the... building I was in," Jesse said, catching herself before the 'Oldest House' came out, and walked over to look at it. "It might work."

[badassprodigy]

"Well if this shit doesn't work than I'll fucking eat it," he said putting it back down on the cart. "I'll need to retrofit the Town Hall's network connection for this office. Once I'm done with that you'll have access to an IBM 3033 Mainframe located at my warehouse which can pull whatever island data I've compiled. Which means no fucking faxes ever again."

You're welcome.

[weirderthanthou]

"That's at least more environmentally friendly," said Jesse, which wasn't a comment on Barry's faxing habits, except for where it was. "Thanks."

A pause.

"Hey, are you okay...? You've been, uh. Loud."

[badassprodigy]

Actually Jesse might have noted that there were less faxes since over the weekend.

"Uh. Yeah," Barry said looking a little sheepish. "When the island does weird shit I tend to freak the fuck out. However over the weekend I think I turned a fucking corner on that. From now on I'll send you less bullshit and more on crap we should actually worry about.."

He turned back to the cart and pulled out another object. On the side of the "frankenphone" was a tiny qwerty keyboard cobbled from an old messaging pager.

"Speaking of which, how about a phone you can use that won't explode in your hand? Now Nina won't have to field texts for you."

[weirderthanthou]

It took a while for 'lack of faxes' to set in after 'needing to use the spare bedroom to stash all the faxes' occurred.

"That... might be nice. I get the impression she editorializes," Jesse said, reaching for it. "It works like a regular one?"

[badassprodigy]

"Well. Mostly. Except you have a very tiny screen you have to read from," Barry said holding it out for Jesse to take. "And you can't go on the internet. But it's an upgrade from the ancient way of texting which meant using the number pad and really working hard for the letter S."

[weirderthanthou]

Jesse took the phone.

She waited a moment.

"Well," she said. "It doesn't explode."

[badassprodigy]

"Well it can but you have to type in the first 20 digits of Pi and then you have a one minute timer before it goes off."

Was he joking? He was probably joking.

[weirderthanthou]

She couldn't tell.

"That might be useful?" she offered.

Sort of? She already had a gun she could modulate into spitting explosives by just thinking about it and shaking it.

[badassprodigy]

"I'll consider that for the next phone upgrade," Barry chuckled. "If that's something that would be helpful."

Hey. You never know!

"So, anyway. Give me a day to set up the network and you should be good to go. And I promise you won't get shit from me unless it's a potential hazard."

[weirderthanthou]

"No, no, I don't need extra explosives," Jesse said quickly. "But thanks for being flexible."

Ahem.

"And, you know," she said slowly, "I'd also like to think of us as friends, so if you're actually worried about something that's not a big emergency, you can talk to me." Beat. "Just don't spam the work line."

[badassprodigy]

"Oh."

Barry blinked for a moment and suddenly some of the social cluelessness he never seemed to catch clicked in. "Yeah. I get that. Sorry for the abuse there."

[weirderthanthou]

Well, he was socially clueless, Jesse was socially anxious, it... sort of worked most of the time?

"It's fine," she said. "I was just worried about you, a little."