apocalypsehowcomm | Early August Stuff

Who: Cortana and ...you? (+ closed stuff for Bucky and Yelena)
When: Early August
Where: Around town
Summary: Cortana goes overboard fighting and antagonizing entities, eats shit and nearly dies as a result.
Warnings: Violence, rude gestures and offensive language, killing and dissecting monsters, Cortana nearly dying, probably more, will warn in thread

A)

(Those cars that are mysteriously tailing people around town? Yeah, they're doing a really bad job of escaping notice.

If they're trying to scare her, it's not working. She was built by a monstrously corrupt organization, she knows an entity badly mimicking surveillance tactics in an attempt to farm fear.

...Still doesn't mean she likes any of this.

Friends, and really anyone who knows her, might not be surprised to find her approaching, throwing rocks at, or--probably the most common option--casually flipping the bird at the cars. Yes, really. Sometimes she sticks her tongue out too. It might even be possible to catch her blowing a raspberry at a car as it's peeling away.)

B) For Yelena

(Look, taunting the drivers of the black cars is all well and good but knowing the entities this is probably harmful in a way that goes beyond just making people paranoid.

Also she wants to know what exactly is going on.)

Hey Yelena. (She may or may not have been the friend Cortana was originally looking for, but Cortana isn't interested in waiting around and Yelena is, she knows, good with electronics... and also murder, which, let's face it, is likely to be happening here.)

You wanna see if we can catch the driver of one of those cars that have been following people around? I'll shoot out the tires, you stop them from leaving on foot?

C) For Winter

(It's something she's always wanted, to just be able to spend time with the people she cares about without worrying about upcoming battles or the fate of the galaxy. That she can have that here is something she is eternally grateful for, even with the horrors of the entities constantly plaguing them.

For someone whose mind is constantly going a mile a minute even with cognitive limiters, Winter's often low key activity preferences might seem like some kind of exotic torture, but while it is true that inactivity is agonizing, this isn't quite that. Also, again, she's just grateful for the opportunity.

The memories will help, perhaps, the next time she has to face the terrors inherent to living in this world. Fortunately that shouldn't be for a while, and for now she can lounge around breaking records for the most inactive smart AI as she enjoys the company of one of her closest friends.

At least, she thinks it won't be for a while...)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There's an illusion here, this place isn't covered by ADI's void on Milo's glamors, but thankfully Winter is in too much of a hurry to think too hard about it. Especially once she starts smoking.

Oh, that's not great. Winter vaults over the back of the couch and into the kitchen, where there's a handy fire extinguisher. Then he vaults back over while popping the seal, landing and immediately giving her back a quick spray, in the hopes of stopping an electrical fire before it gets too far.

He's fast, and the fire is easy enough to stop. The smell is still there though.

And then, despite this probably being a terrible idea (not that she's actually thinking or making the decision), Cortana's body jerks a little as she begins to power back on. Ugh. Where is she? She tries to remember what she was doing. She was with...

..."Winter?"

"Don't move," Winter says, clear worry in his voice for once, setting the fire extinguisher aside and kneeling down next to her. "Something broke inside you. There was almost a fire."

"Ş̷̘̫͔̞̰͖̓̓̊h̴̨̜̯̖̮̱̰̑͑̽͋͘̕͠ĩ̶̢̺̯̪̣̱̣̦̍͊͋̑̍͘t̶̤̏̅͗̃͠"

Well that's a worrying amount of static. "Ok̵a̷y̸."

She does a good job of keeping the terror out of her voice. She should shut down. She needs to shut down... but she doesn't want to.

"...Winter?"

"I'm looking for what broke," he says, moving the panel further aside and peering in at the wires and circuits. "Who should I take you to if I can't fix it." Because he is rather less certain about being able to fix it than to find it. Finding something that snapped or frayed or started to melt shouldn't be too hard, unless it's buried deep.

"I don't... there aren't many techs left." Her voice is trembling ever so slightly. "Maybe the natives working in the labs, but without Copernicus..."

This might really be it, she thinks.

She still doesn't shut down.

"You should've taught me how to do this shit when I asked you the first time," Winter grumbles, yanking a plate aside with metal fingers, because it's too hot for his real hand. He'll have to screw it back in later, but at least now he can see more of her wires inside, hunting for the short circuit. "Can you tell me what system is malfunctioning worst."

If she's going to resist shutting down, at least she can help him find the problem.

"Lesson learned." She croaks out, too exhausted to argue.

"I think it's in the wires connecting my power supply to my coolant pump." She can, apparently, get more specific than just the system.

One of her legs spasms briefly. The muscles are probably firing incorrectly due to breakdown of temperature regulation and residual heat from the flames.

"Can I use wires from something else to replace them?" he asks. "Temporarily?" So she doesn't overheat.

The power supply is at least is easy to find, he knows what that looks like, and-- yup, there's the fried wire cluster. Briefly thanking HYDRA for the metal fingers, he pulls them away so they can't keep threatening sparks, looking for something less essential to replace them with until he can find some actual replacements. Coolant is pretty important.

Cortana pauses, and lets out a little sigh.

"It'd be easier if I just shut down." She would probably need to eventually anyway, and that would make it so it didn't matter if her coolant pump was nonfunctional. Still, it was ...difficult. She'd been so afraid that she wouldn't wake up if she did.

Maybe, but the thought makes him want to panic a little. He doesn't, he clamps it down, but the desire is there. "Do you have spare wires somewhere I can replace these with? If you do, you can shut down, and I can do the replacement." He thinks. He hopes.

"In my bag." She keeps a spare of everything she can fit in there nowadays.

She'll wait for him to find the wires before she actually shuts off.

"Got 'em," he says after a moment of rummaging through the bag, dropping back to his knees next to her with the bag at his side. "It doesn't looks like I'll need to sauter anything. So this should be quick."

"I'll shut down." Still, she pauses for a moment before finally letting out a sigh and shutting herself down.

He works as quickly as he can, patching the new wires in place to replace the burned ones, checking the feed to the coolant to make sure nothing leaked or got backed up during the short, cleaning up a little of the singe marks on her power chassis.

Then he resets the power core, which is what woke her up last time. Hopefully that starts things up again this time, too.

Early August Stuff

aww, at least there's several of them!!

Lol I pretty much blasted through all of them

now you should read the Raksura books by the same author :D

I'll add them to my list

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