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 Posted: Sat Oct 21, 2006 3:38 am
{Oops.}
Tomias waited a few seconds, shifting his weight uneasily between all four feet, before suddenly springing into action. The flat unit that made up the main part of his computer was soon unclipped from his side, his form laying down on the floor with a light thump and a few clanks and clunks. The centaur quite busily set about connecting this to that, pulling things from various compartments and setting them upon the floor.
Within half a minute he was done, carefully adjusting a holographic screen as well as adjusting a little earpiece that attatched to the very tip of his fluffy ear. The centaur had seemingly discarded the headset that had previously been given to him, the object put aside for the time being, and apparently he had set up his own version of it.
The set up was fairly neat, a greyish-black box sitting with wires spewing out of either side had the main display of the thing sitting atop it, the holographic screen staying static in the air as it displayed the current state of the system in some strange form of some strange language. The only thing that could clearly by read by anyone was a percentage sign at the top right, and perhaps a few other symbols and signs dotted around the screen. A few other displays branched from the main screen, the projectors held in place by delicate little supports made from what appeared to be fuse wire.
There were three sets of keyboards too, one standard-sized that was connected directly to the greyish-black box hub, the top hinged from the construction of it. Another appeared a little longer that the standard-sized one, the recognisable latin letters muddled and mixed together with symbols that matched the symbols and letters on each of the many displays. The other, the smallest one, appeared to be foldable and had it's own little holographic screen flickering slightly above it, the projectors fixed onto a little flip-out section from the tiny and portable keyboard.
Tomias tured his head up to Andre from where he hadpositioned himself near the wall, beaming possibly for the first time in the tower. He held up a small lead with a little connection on the end of it, waving it slightly.
"If you could plug this into your system somewhere it'd give me a direct and faster link to your systems." the centaur stated with a little smile, his stutter vanished from his speech; most likely due to the familiar surroundings.
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Posted: Sat Oct 21, 2006 5:12 am
Andre stepped back, shaking his head. As the centaur produced item after item out of the pouched harnessed to his sides, Andre came to the conclusion that he himself had too few legs. ... Not that he was going to do anything about that, really, but he could still wish he'd been born with a body more suited to carrying delicate electrical items. Or, rather, non-biointegrated delicate electrical items. He'd used D.I., and still the thought of it gave him the jitters. Severely.
Tomias worked quickly and efficiently, and had completed the setup in under a minute. It really was rather elegant, although he knew Caleb would not approve of all the wires spilling out. The boy had this almost obsessive desire for everything to be neat and smooth. Of course, that was nice, but Andre did not see how it was really neccessary.
Finished with assembling his gear, Tomias looked up at Andre, vaguely waving the end of a lead, grinning like a schoolboy. "If you could plug this into your system somewhere it'd give me a direct and faster link to your systems," he explained.
Andre smiled and nodded. "One moment." He walked briskly back to his desk, entered a three-key sequence, and the image of the one-handed keyboard followed as he raised his hand from the desk. He returned, chewing his top lip as he stared at the wall Tomias had assembled his equipment, his fingers flickering across the thin air the images of the keys were floating in. Access codes. And even here, in the Tower, with people selected for exactly such skills, no-one had yet been able to follow Andre's hands closely enough to determine what it was he was typing.
"May I have a look at that?" he asked, extending his free hand. A brief examination of the connection, and of the wiring to the box, and he entered something else, glared at the wall for a bit, then entered another sequence again. A tiny spot on the wall rippled a little, then tore itself open, re-forming into the shape of a port for the connector. "Gremlins," he smiled, and handed the lead back to Tomias. "I'll let you do the honours."
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Flynn MacCumhaill Captain
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Posted: Sat Oct 21, 2006 6:11 am
Tomias blinked, an ear flicking towards the new plug before his eyes had the chance to. Hesitantly, he slipped the connection cable into the wall. Instantly the main screen picked up it's activity, the percentage with it's odd shaped numbers changing erratically until it settled into a slight flicker between two numbers. What appeared to be codes began to roll up the screen as if performing checks on the data it was recieving.
Tomias happily typed away on the mainkeyboard, adjusting things, changing colours of things until it looked just right for the little centaur. He then happilly typed away on the second keyboard, his tail swishing about slightly as a little tune slowly made itself known from Tomias' throat. The centaur didn't really look like the one to hum, although it was mainly a subconcious happening somewhere near the back of Tomias' brain that he didn't really know about.
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Posted: Sat Oct 21, 2006 6:52 am
Andre had dismissed the 'portable' keyboard almost as soon as he had returned the end of the lead to Tomias, and he stepped back again, waiting for the centaur to be finished with whatever adjustments and adaptations he needed to undertake.
He was put in the unfamiliar role of watching a display of characters he could not read -- although he could guess what was going on. There would be a few noses out of joint once certain people discovered that there was another among them who did not use Standard, and therefore whose shoulder they could not look over. He allowed himself an inward smile. He definitely liked this particular youth.
The centaur began to hum as he worked. Ah. Andre pressed his lips together. No-one's perfect. As long as he kept it quiet, though, it should be no problem.
As for his comment about Gremlins, Andre was not like Y'karrhr, and felt no need to continue talking unneccessarily. The author, however -- and perhaps unfortunately -- was rather more like the crazy head of mech, and had no such reservations.
The Tower computer system -- and all the rest -- was a custom-made fusion monster, designed carefully so to combine all the best bits of the major hardware types (laser/optics, quantum, bio, and old-fashioned EM), while cutting out the major faults in each (decipherable radiation from EM and quantum, fickleness and chunkiness of laser/optics, fragility of bio.) This married carefully married with the not-so-new concept of "smart materials" had produced a system that almost looked like magic. The project had been begun under the previous Towermaster, and indeed, under the previous head of Tech Sys, but had only been completed in Caleb's early reign. The boy-Towermaster had dubbed the as yet unnamed new technology 'Gremlins', for fairly obvious reasons.
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Flynn MacCumhaill Captain
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Posted: Sat Oct 21, 2006 7:17 am
Tomias finished within another minute, now turning his head up to Andre with a questionning look. His humming had stopped just as abruptly as his typing. "Uhm. What am I m-m-meant to be doing?" he asked hesitantly, his ears gently drooping as he waited for an answer, the wire trailing from his right ear snagging itself on a buckle of a harness, no doubt in the early stages of getting tangled.
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Posted: Sun Oct 22, 2006 3:50 am
"You could start by looking up your cell -- Psi-8," he smiled. "Let me know when you have a location for them."
Though I know they're with that devil's-spawn miniature ape, he grinned to himself. Poor things.
By this point, a rather tall individual with deep orange chitinous skin, long black quills down the back of his head and neck, and large feathered wings had made his way over to where Andre was standing. He didn't have a mouth, as such, but rather two slits down the sides of his face, which doubled as mouth and nose. He said something quietly to Andre, in a hissing whisper. If the centaur could make it out, it would have made little sense to him: most of it was Tower codes and jargon. Andre, his face now serious, nodded, and gave a short, but equally nonsensical answer.
The large orange individual paused a moment, then whispered, "And who is this?"
"Oh!" Andre relaxed again with the change of topic. "Volarin, Tomias. Tomias, Volarin. Tomias is part of today's new cell -- psi-eight."
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Flynn MacCumhaill Captain
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Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2006 11:45 am
"Err...right. Easy." Yamil gave a half hearted shrug and glanced over to Snap. Maybe it would be best to try it in here, with a floor only a couple feet away before trying it out there.
He positioned the board as had Y'karrhr, and with a bit of difficulty (and quite a bit of wobbling) managed to pull himself to a standing position on it.
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Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 2:23 am
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Flynn MacCumhaill Captain
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Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 4:39 pm
((oopsie ... real life pulled me away from online life for the last little while - that and running on empty for the last week or so ... sorry))
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Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 10:34 pm
((Meh, that happens. You haven't perchance heard from Mieko...? ))
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Flynn MacCumhaill Captain
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Posted: Sun Nov 26, 2006 9:21 pm
(( sorry, have not heard from anyone .... Im staying up late just to be able to post. Have not posted anything since last time so I hope people dont forget I exist))
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