HarperMadi
🎨 Media Gallery
- RP Date
- YE 46
- RP Location
- Black Sands Test range, Operation La Prossima HQ
JP with @Hollander posted multipart
A couple hours had passed since the unfortunate and frankly unprofessional outburst by Thorn, and as she watched the others work, she considered her options. She wasn’t good at apologies. She knew that. But she looked at her arm, where every scar and every horrific surgery had been faithfully recreated in the construction of this body. Purely for the sake of functionality. Her functionality. These weren’t just beatings and injuries. Almost a third of these were modifications. By people who saw her as a tool to be used, where she was kept small, kept from feeling hunger and from feeling tired. Where breathing was necessary no matter how low the oxygen got, or how toxic the gasses. She could feel the turbine below her heart, where air passed to filters and rebreathers replacing a portion of her lungs, concentrating the oxygen in the air or providing enough. Didn’t keep her from getting injured for lack of skill, and repaired enough to get back to her task.
The damage to that Android reminded her of herself, and as she set down her tablet, she shook her head. It was too similar. And so she walked to Shinobu’s office, knocking gently on the door.
“Enter!” came the call. It was the Doctor’s voice, but it didn’t carry with it any of the attitude or cocksurety that he’d seemed to exude back in the Black Sands hangar. In fact… he sounded almost cheerful.
The door would open to a dimly lit laboratory space filled haphazardly with rolling medical terminals and technological obelisks. They stood about the room like a poorly-arranged cemetery; gray columns and silver blocks, their foreboding shapes interrupted by glowing display screens. Depending on one’s beliefs, the space looked veritably haunted. In the center of this graveyard, two ‘ghosts’ went about their business. One was the Doctor, his lab-coated body hunched in a too-short wheeled stool. A headset covered his green-haired skull, and a thick bundle of cables and wires ran from it to a system in front of him. The nameless Geboku was the other ‘ghost’, standing silently and unmoving as it observed its master.
As Thorn would enter, the android turned, internal machinery whirring quietly as it did so. Its motion ought to be silent; a sound meant that parts were noisily moving against each other inside its form. Geboku skeletal systems used Osmiridium filaments to join bone to bone, in the same way as ligaments in most humanoid bodies. It was possible that the filaments were wearing down somehow, or that the Ionic Adhesive that secured those filaments were failing. Could robots suffer from arthritis?
“Come on in, come on in. I’ll be out in a moment.” Shinobu said through a smile. By ‘out’, he must have meant ‘out’ of the virtual space he was working in, under the headset. Whatever he was working on, he was pretty damned pleased with how it was going.
“Take your time,” Thorn responded politely, offering a smile and a small bow to the nameless Geboku. “Is there any way I can help at the moment?”
As Thorn moved towards what she assumed to be the main workdesk, she observed each of the obelisks. Where another would have seen a haunted lab, Thorn saw the same clutter she had grown accustomed to in her own work. When a blooming nation would offer her asylum for her services and knowledge, the labs always started out looking like this, only growing more modern and clean as the budget grew and she could afford to hire people who had more of an eye for a clean workspace. She could work in a space like this, provided no one touched anything and messed up her organization. She respectfully didn’t touch any of the displays, nor look too deeply or try to connect. No, she wasn’t here to borrow or acquire any data sets. Not from him. Though she had some for him when he requested it. “I’m leaving a data tablet on your workdesk. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what I’m looking at with it, so I figure you’ll have better luck than I will.”