Log01.entry

[ugh_emotions]

Who: SecUnit, Charles, and eventually other people depending on how things go lots of other people, everyone join in
What: SecUnit checks up Charles, no one has a good time
When: Just before the start of the Story
Where: The stacks
Content warnings: SecUnit getting accidentally bricked

Every time SecUnit or one of its drones caught sight of Charles, he seemed to look even more dead than the last time.

Which was weird. He was already dead (which was also weird), surely he couldn't get any more dead. You were either dead or you weren't.

Whatever. It wasn't SecUnit's problem. Charles wasn't one of its humans. It didn't need to worry about him.

(It worried about him.)

Eventually though, it gets to the point where it can't ignore it anymore, and it stomps over to where Charles is in the Stacks.

"What's wrong with you?" it demands.

Comments

[birdchasingecho]

"Inter-- ah. Internal interface." Different words, same concept. Still, there's almost no blunt force trauma to speak of. "So light...?"

.. and what little she swore she saw knit up as she watched, as well. "... hm. Perhaps I should have brought my laptop, instead-- if this is common enough there's probably an external bus to check on the interface's status."

[hellandbackpack]

Charles was about to reply, probably crash out a little harder at the joke- it got a near-hysterical little giggle out of him all the same, but thankfully someone else showing up distracted him. A bit reassuring seeing Mei with her kit, with the stuff to help someone out and what sounded like the knowledge to use it.

It wasn't going to soothe him all the way, but it did keep him from spiraling much farther in the moment. Guilt hitting him at the idea that he'd hurt Rin making his grimace and tone a little sharper than it needed to as he replied. "I didn't let off an emp, it's not sommat I do on purpose-"

He managed to cut off, taking a shaking breath he didn't need to try and calm himself, glaring down at his hands. Fuck. Fuck, just existing around people here if he couldn't keep a lid on it was going to hurt them?

"I should... probably go then, yeah? If... just bein' around me is gonna do this-" How the hell could he even tell who was safe to be around?

[codeswitchcraft]

"How close were you to Rin when it happened?" Siobhan asks, frowning a little. "Does your eeyempy field have a certain radius? We can just make sure that people who probably have cybernetics don't get very close to you."

[birdchasingecho]

"Most such fields drop by half if you double the distance." She pulls out her cell phone and hums. ... No... Obvious ports...

No. One obvious port. ... One she, unsurprisingly, can't interface with. She sighs. "Yeah, this is up to Rin now."

[hellandbackpack]

"About... this far?" He estimated, holding a hand out. A bit closer than the norm, given SecUnit had stepped in front of him, but that was hardly it's fault.

"It's... normally it's not like that. Normally, so long as I don't like... walk through someone physically, they don't even feel it," He grimaced, shaking his head. "But then we don't have people with cybernetics back home. Not anything like this. Normal tech like... I dunno, phones, computers and stuff, they all kinda get messed up if I stay around 'em too long."

[codeswitchcraft]

"Great. Amazing."

Siobhan hooks her arms under SecUnit's arms and starts pulling it back away from Charles with her--but since Strength was her dump stat, it's a bit of a struggle.

[birdchasingecho]

"Easy. I got it, if we need it. But I'm not sure we do." She looks up. "Charles, right? If you have an exercise or something that helps you stay calm, feel free. I'm not gonna take anyone down 'cause of an accident, and you're pretty worried about Rin, I can tell."

She closes the first aid kit, and is, unlike everyone else, acting calm, even if she doesn't quite feel calm, for reasons unrelated.

[hellandbackpack]

"Yeah that's..." The assurance might've helped. Maybe not calmed him, but Charles could have maybe gotten a better grip on himself if he didn't see that alarmed sort of response from Siobhan. He couldn't help the faint flinch as something in his expression closed off, and he recoiled slightly, already moving.

"Nah. Nah, don't move them if you don't need to- I can just go."

[codeswitchcraft]

"I'm not going to force you to leave," Siobhan says, still attempting to pull SecUnit with her. She's been able to move it maybe two inches so far. "You didn't do it on purp-- augh."

Her arms slip out from under SecUnit's armpits and she sways visibly.

"Did... did someone catch the arms on the coach that hit me?" she slurs in... well, everyone can understand it, because of the Library's translation effect, but it's very clear that she's suddenly switched from her usual English to straight-up German.

[birdchasingecho]

"Okay. There's a lot of jumpin' to conclusions here..." She secures the kit to her back... Somehow... and then Sio gets hit with the second EMP, and she feels her phone spark and shut down like the cheap piece of crap it is, and sighs in resignation. She wasn't sure what she expected to happen. ... Well, at least the battery didn't explode, small favors.

German, huh? ... Understandable. She didn't learn German, but she knows a few other languages. Maybe she should pick a different one than Japanese?

Thankfully, she is 100% pure human (she says), and thus immune to EMPs. That she's also capable of... After a moment's assessment... picking up SecUnit in a way that is, in fact, safe given its anatomy, like picking up a bunch of grapes, and as immobilized as she can make it? Might cause some reassessments as to her capabilities. "Sio. C'mon."

It... Looks a little ridiculous, given how small Mei is compared to SecUnit, but she gets it far enough to be safe before gently returning it to an on-back position, and begins standing guard.

[hellandbackpack]

Charles froze for a moment seeing Siobhan being affected now, eyes widening as he drew back a bit more emphatically, shaking his head.

"I- I'm just gonna make things worse if I stick around. Just-" He gave himself a little shake and a rake of a hand through his hair, pushing quickly to his feet before glancing towards Mein, brows lifting slightly at the sight of her hefting SecUnit so easily. "Just let me know when they're alright, yeah?"

He wasn't going to wait around for something else to go wrong on his account- he'd just seem to vanish into thin air, though an attentive eye would see the wet footprints tracking his progress, straight towards and through one of the nearby walls of shelving. And the drone would likely still be able to track him through energy signatures should it be scanning for that sort of thing.

[codeswitchcraft]

"I ain't afraid of no ghosts," Siobhan mumbles in English, before shaking her head violently, as if she's trying to clear it. "Ugh. Stupid-- I want Mutti," she whines in German again. "I want Mutti and Mutti doesn't exist. Vati does but he's a lying murderer-- I want Mutti."

She lurches forward, stumbling over nothing, tumbling top over teakettle and somersaulting the rest of the way to SecUnit and Mei. "Augh. Fuck. Stupid eeyempy. Rin, I'm keeping your secrets. Like I promised."

[birdchasingecho]

"Yep." She definitely didn't feel any gun ports or anything. "Come. Sit near me a while. I ain't yer Mutti, but I can keep watch over you."

And, in fact, she is keeping watch, as a bodyguard would. Eyes over every inch of the library she can see, marking well the exits and entrances.

[codeswitchcraft]

"I miss Mutti," Siobhan says, still in German. "Even though she isn't real. None of my memories from before I Woke Up are." She lies down next to SecUnit and pats its shoulder.

"Rin is a very good andrax. Earth human. The best."

[ugh_emotions]

When SecUnit comes back online, it isn't all at once. Its systems are still scrambled, trying to restart after being shutdown in a way they were very much not meant to be.

And it just so happens that its buffer is what activates first. It doesn't twist, it doesn't move its eyes, it doesn't even blink. It just starts to speak, abruptly.

"Please stand by. Your Unit is rebooting," it says, in a voice that sounds...different. Even, measured. It sounds like the perfectly calibrated customer service voice. It sounds nothing like how SecUnit usually speaks.

"Please be advised that initiation of a forced shutdown of your Unit is a violation of your contract and will incur penalty fees upon--"

The buffer is cut off, strangled as SecUnit finally gains enough control over its systems to react. Its eyes open, going wide. Visual and audio inputs online.

It stares, inhumanly still, at all the people who have surrounded it. It doesn't move.

But it's wearing an expression of ever deepening horror.

[birdchasingecho]

"... Well. Your heart beats, regardless." She won't argue the last tuesdayism of it all; she doesn't know Siobhan nearly well enough to say. "Let it beat for who it may. And I agree."

Slowly, SecUnit comes back online, and--

And despite her expression remaining perfectly neutral, Mei's heart-rate spikes in fury, her fists clench. She knows damned well what would cause someone to have to do that after a catastrophic shutdown on her world and she likes the implications not one whit, not least because of her own restrictions on her behavior.

She lets go, nods. "Welcome back, then. Apologies for the rough treatment earlier."

[codeswitchcraft]

"Rin," Siobhan says in a too loud whisper, still a little woozy, "you don't want to say that out loud."

[obeir]

By this point K has managed to track everyone down — or everyone aside from Charles, whose absence he notes — so SecUnit's concerned audience grows by one. The android takes in the odd scene before him, not entirely sure what to make of it.

"What happened...?"

Charles's panicked message hadn't included many details, but it's obvious SecUnit had been knocked offline somehow and has just now rebooted.

[ohaiyo_isekai]

Hikaru maneuvers so he can be a supportive shoulder for the very out of it Siobhan, trying to work out a spell for clearing EMP scrambling on the fly.

He was there for Rin's boot-up sequence. He understood what it meant. Perfectly Ordinary Progress Level 12 Human With Cybernetics, huh?

Nevertheless, his reaction is:

"Good morning, Rin." He chokes back the urge to say hello world. "Gave us a bit of a scare. Are you quite yourself again?"

[ugh_emotions]

They're all looking at it.

It doesn't know what happened, not yet, but they're all looking at it, and they all heard its buffer. They heard it say it was rebooting. Heard it call itself...a unit...

It's too much. The concern, the attention, everything. It's too much. Everything has just gone very wrong, very quickly, and it's too much.

In less than a second, SecUnit goes from being completely still and stationary, lying on the ground, to scrambling up and onto its feet and bolting through the Stacks at full SecUnit speed.

And it doesn't stop running until it finds a place to hide.

[birdchasingecho]

Mei watches it go, then... "Perhaps that was too much of a scene..."