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 Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 4:53 pm
Gearbox wiped his eyes
"I...had a flashback...thats all. Someone told me awhile back that this place plays tricks on troubled minds, makes you dream of lost memories while you're wide awake. I didn't belive him at first, never thought I would...but now I'm starting to think that he was right. Maybe he lived here once..."
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Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 5:17 pm
"Then what did you have a flashback to? It sounds as if I was in it... I don't have any lost memories, I think, so it would be interesting to remember them since I must have forgotten them so thoroughly." She lets out a dry laugh. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude."
She stands on one foot, holding her left foot with her cybernetic left arm, stretching. Kind of edgy, and nervous, and shaken.
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Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 5:43 pm
Ruin glared into spider's eyes
"I'd rather not bring it up right now".
They reached the basement and the elevator doors racked open showing a hall about half the size of a small aircraft hangar.
"Alright here we are"
In the basement was a large black van backed in from a ramp leading to the outside door. Next to the van stood a tall tool box.
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Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 2:57 pm
Spider begins giving the vehicle a rough inspection, walking around it and checking for any obvious damage. There's a dent the size of a cinderblock but that's almost certainly not the main problem. She frowns at the van, opening a door and peering around. She opens a small access panel on the dashboard and holds a wire carefully with her cybernetic hand.
"Wow. Impressive security system. This thing doesn't even wanna tell me where it hurts..." she says, in a heavily sarcastic fake-maternal tone. "So, they tell you what the problem is? I don't wanna have to bust the encryption. That would be a pain..."
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Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 4:54 pm
"Heh, actually the main problem is in here."
Gearbox kicked the front of the van and the hood flipped open, a burst of carbon dust puffed out and dispersed.
"right here, one of the pistons melted a bit and jammed up, that caused the air intake to impode which caused the stored oxygen to ignite and explode. This thing is going to need a whole new engine"
He bent over to take a good look at the melted lump of metal that once was a working motor.
"The tricky part is gonna be getting this thing out of the van, It's fused to the front of the van."
Gearbox sighed.
"I'd better call the guy in for a delay, This is pretty bad."
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Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 8:04 pm
"So ka," she says, with a nod. "Well, at least it's simple... It's just a matter of un-fusing it... but without making Chinese takeout of the front of the van. And getting a new engine. I suppose the real question is if we'll be able to get the engine..."
Spider goes to look through the toolbox, trying to find something that would work to separate ex-engine from van. Finally she finds a laser that looks as if it might work. It got melted on... so the best approach would be, of course, to melt it off. She holds up the laser and looks at Gearbox.
"D'you think this'll unstick the engine?" She doesn't want to screw the whole thing up and get called a twink then. Better to be a twink on a small scale.
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Posted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 12:18 pm
"That would work, I'll take a little while...but it'll work."
He walks over to the tool box and crouches down, He opens up a dor and takes out a root beer. He grinned.
"I have mini-fridges all over the place"
He guzzled down the rot beer and shashed the can under his platforms.
"You want one?"
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Posted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 5:57 pm
"Oh, yes please." Come to think of it, it's been a long time since she's had root beer. Since soda is a "luxury", you can't buy it with a chow chit. And whenever she had money of her own, she wound up spending it on something to get drunk on. She grabs a root beer, opens the lid with the pinkie finger of her cybernetic arm (the pinkie is flat. Since pinkie fingers aren't useful for much in actuality, she got one to use as a scraper and miniature crowbar), and takes a sip.
"But what would you recommend, instead of this?" She gestures with the laser. "I've never worked much with vehicles. I'm used to smaller things. Cybernetics and computers and such. Or motorbikes and mopeds."
She sets about using the laser to melt the wrecked engine off out of the vehicle anyway. It's like melting wax with a match. A lot of wax, but it works. "Seems all right to me. Maybe something... pointy would work too, but... I like lasers. It's easier to do a clean job of it."
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Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 10:09 am
"The laser would be the best option but..."
Gearbox smirked.
"We could make more profit and have a bit of fun if we do this the dirty way. Use the lazer to dig a hole into the steel and fil the hole with nitro-cellulose and compress itv so that it wil expode the inside. Due to the fact that the metal melted without flux, It is loaded with impurities and wil crumble. Nitro-cellulose is impact sensitive like gun powder, so we can simply throw a hammer at it and it will blow up."
He looked over to the corner of the room and pointed to a workbench covered in sawdust.
"I can make Nitro- Cellulose from sawdust and propane from the stove in the old cafeteria. I'll be back to get the propane, while I'm gone you can work on that hole, Make it about a foot deep, the width doesn't really matter."
He walked to the elevator door, turned his head and asked
"Any questions?"
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Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 4:19 pm
"Hmm... nitro-cellulose... isn't that like that stuff people used to put in billiard balls way back when, and if they were made wrong and you hit them too hard you'd suddenly find yourself with no more table?" She seems to have shared the story purely for the pyromaniacal interest. Her smile looks about as evil as Gearbox's. "Or am I thinking of something else? Anyway, you go do that." She starts working on making the foot-deep hole, humming over the sizzling noise. It sounds like Doom's most recent song.
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Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 5:13 pm
"Never heard of the billiard ball thing, but nitro-cellulose is guncotton, which is strange because it's a gunky substance and nothing like cotton..but yeah If you hit it, it goes bang." He got in the elevator and the doors racked shut and the elevator rose.
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Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 7:06 pm
She continues working, pausing occasionally to drink her root beer. It's pretty mind-numbing work, and although she has no lost memories, she has a lot she hasn't been thinking about. Whether it's the boredom, the building, or thinking that the building has powers, she can't help remembering visiting the free clinic in Central City.
Her left arm had ached on and off all week. Which was most definitely odd, given that she had no left arm. And she kept waking up at about 2 AM in a cold sweat, feeling as if she needed desperately to get away from something so terrible, enormous and strange and unearthly, she couldn't even think of how to describe it. And she'd felt even weaker than normal. So, since she didn't have much money to go anywhere else, she wound up here, at the Sacred Heart Clinic, funded by rich benefactors and brimming with advertisements which would have been jarringly strange in a medical setting a century ago.
'So, Doc,' Spider said, smiling nervously at the cartoonish form of address, the cliched words, 'Am I gonna make it?'
The doctor looked at her over the screen floating before him. He's only perhaps ten years older than she is, pale, with glossy black hair hanging slightly in front of his cybereye. 'I wouldn't go so far as to say you're not going to live, but your symptoms are pretty bad. You see, your body is unusually sensitive to cybernetics. If you don't do something, in a year or so you'll be in the early stages of CIRS.'
'You mean a bakebrain?' she exclaimed, incredulously. She felt disturbingly like she was acting out a bad soap opera.
He sounded permanently bored. 'Not the term I'd use, Ms. Cruz, but basically, yes.'
'Well, what am I supposed to do about it?'
'We've caught it early, so it should be easy to cure. I'm going to prescribe some immunosuppressants-'
'Tanj!' Spider exclaimed. 'So I'm gonna have to take drek that'll make me get sick all the damn time? I need that like a hole in my head...'
'Speaking of that...' He seemed to be staring at her low-budget datajack. His cybereye made it all the more unnerving. 'Removing some of your cybernetics, or at least upgrading them-'
'Oh, so funny I forgot to laugh. "A hole in my head." I can't remove this stuff, you svoluch. Do you live under a rock? I need this stuff! And do I look like I could afford to upgrade?' She pulled at her threadbare blue cotton yukata. 'If I could afford immunosuppressants and better chrome, do you think I'd be in your godforsaken little free clinic? Do you have any practical suggestions, or am I stuck getting more and more hexed?'
She realizes the hole is already a bit more than a foot deep, puts down the laser, and finishes her root beer. Maybe she'd been a bit hard on him. But she had no good options! If she dumped all her cybernetics, she'd be a cripple, and practically blind, deaf, and dumb. If she took immunosuppressants, she'd end up even frailer than she was already. The only decent option would be to upgrade, and that would only help a tiny bit, and it would be expensive.
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Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 8:50 pm
Gearbox returned with a small can of propane in hand. He walked over to spider and took the her can just as she set it down
"I'm back."
He kept walking to the workbench and put sawdust into the can, then poured in the propane and swished around
"all right here we go"
Gearbox poured the mixture into the hole, crushed the can and rolled it up.
"Here's our plug."
He stuck the rolled up can into the hole.
"Stand back"
He stepped back and grabbed hammer off the toolbox and kept walking backwards until he was up against the wall.
"You ready?"
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Posted: Thu Jul 27, 2006 1:21 pm
She grins as she backs up against the wall. "Yup- but... wait. Won't it mess up the van?"
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Posted: Thu Jul 27, 2006 1:47 pm
"No, there's not enough to do much damage. Just enough to blow up the engine...Well what's left of it anyway. If it does more damage, than more money for us."
Gearbox stared dead on at the engine and shouted
"CRAGO!!"
He threw the hammer...BANG! bits of metal showered the floor.
"Ow!"
Gearbox got hit in the jaw by a chunk of debris, he had a welt, but he was okay.
"My ears are ringing. You okay?"
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