Welcome to Gaia! ::

The part about being 'Deus-owned' was immediately scrubbed from her memory, largely for the sake of her own mental health, as she hurriedly snatched up her half of the exchange.

"Robots," she reiterated, her unblinking stare fixated on the screen. "An umbrella term that references any machines which are semi-autonomous at a minimum, created and programmed to perform predetermined tasks, actions, or duties. Industrial, personal nano, bio, android...et cetera."

This was possibly the first time she'd sounded almost uncannily like Mimsy to anyone who knew her.

"Want any robots." She flopped back onto her bed, screen held above her head, and mindlessly pat the extra space next to her, inviting them to sit (or lay, the debate had never really been settled). "What else--I mean, what's good to find here? Aside from that. You got any adventures on here?"

Her eyes pulled away from the screen long enough to glance at Lucky for half a second. "What's he mean, 'exploded one'? Wait--oh my god, can we go blow s**t up? Not this--this is mine. Other people's s**t."

"In a controlled environment," Mark amended, though it wasn't clear who's part of the conversation he was amending. "Bro, I tell people I blow up things accidentally, and nobody ever believes me, way ahead of you."

His head was halfway into processing a funny joke involving blowing other things (yes, in that way), but the threesome was looking less and less appealing after his fifth cupcake. "Yeah sure we can test the gps out, is there anything in particular you want to blow up?"

She was a trainee what could go wrong. Besides, "We can bring Lucky as our demolitions expert, he's great at that kind of stuff. "

"We could," Mark started amicably, still incredibly pleased he had been treated so well. This was probably only the second time in his life he had actually been offered cupcakes that didn't cause him to grow double D's, "or we could find something to explode. Usually the Sun trainees are pretty good about volunteering for that kind of stuff -"

Suddenly the Death Assistant pause, and developed a sort of sly expression. Honestly, it just looked like he was thinking way too hard (which he was). "Wait a minute, I have an even greater idea. You see I'm supposed to go on a mission later today, and it requires ah, exploding stuff, and I need some help on board, and I know Lucky loves missions."

The gave her a reassuring thumbs up.

"A mission?" Her nose scrunched up in vague disgust. It sounded like work, work for people she didn't especially want to working for in the first place, and a 'no' was on the tip of her tongue until she remembered the reason he'd suggested it.

"Oh. Oh! s**t! You're taking us to--we're going to blow up a Death Star."

That made plenty of sense, considering the context.

"Okay, Rebels. C'mon then." Despite having no idea where they were going, she seemed to be trying to lead their Rebellion by urging them along. While pulling on Mark's arm and reaching for Lucky's, she leaned towards the latter to 'reassure' him. "You're coming but--listen, maybe your daddy had you thinking something different about me, but I'm--I don't need supervising. You're funny!"

She gave him a playful nudge with her shoulder.

"We're dressing nice for demolitions?" Lucky called after the disappearing form of Mark.

***

Fifteen minutes later, Lucky was dressed about as well as Mark could have hoped, in a striped sweater and slacks that had miraculously avoided bloodstains, burns, and unsightly gouging or slashes through the material. 'Nice' as a description may have been a stretch, but he'd managed to just barely end up 'passably average'.

He hadn't even taken more than a few steps into the portal room of the lighthouse when he sensed trouble. Lucky took one look at Caelius and froze, only moving again when the danger had passed and entered the portal instead. He began backing toward the door of the lighthouse. "So I've changed my mind, you two need no supervision with explosives or anything else. Have fun microwaving your hotpockets --"

Lucky attempted at this point to turn around and leave, only to run right into Caroline.

"Pizza hotpockets," Mark repeated, now doing a search on his hacked-phone Google to make sure he wasn't going crazy. "Wait what the heck is a Virginia hot-"

- His second cellphone suddenly buzzed rather noisily and he looked at that at the same time too. "Okay suit up, we're going in." He tossed Caroline a spare headset and a basic runic trap gun to borrow, while giving Lucky just a thumbs up.

It was freezing on the other side, a roaring snowstorm in the middle of what looked like a highway. There were no cars on the highway itself where they were standing, though a sign next to them read CITY OF DETROIT NEXT FIVE EXITS.

"Cool," Mark said over the headset, still not explaining why he asked them to dress nice. "So we're gonna blow up this highway, come and help me set up explosives all the way down it, as far as possible."

He unzipped a duffel bag and began to hand out what looked like miniature runic daggers.

The sharp chill of the air through the portal was jarring, but it somehow only managed to energize her even more.

"HOTH," Caroline excitedly proclaimed, just before squealing with delight through her smile, ignoring the almost instantaneous ache of her teeth from the cold. She could read, of course, and was therefore not totally blind to their obvious approximate location, but none of that really fit the narrative that she was trying to force here.

After sliding her goggles down over her eyes, she moved to get right to work as instructed, unable to keep herself from grinning in spite of what was surely a detriment to her comfort. The fact that they were blowing up a highway gave her no pause, which one could assume had something to do with the sheer excellence of participating in an explosion that size.

"These the charges? New tech?" She asked, trying to speak over the wind. "Haven't seen anything like 'em yet either, definitely interesting--ooh Mark, can we both trigger the detonator?"

Lucky wasn't being uninvited from the detonation itself out of selfishness or neglect; it was truly an act of compassion, since he'd seemed so nervous about being implicated in even more explosions.