-For once, a non-Ravensky outing-
“Wind was too dry yesterday. We’ll have to see if the overnight seeding took.” Ever dressed in her cowgirl style, Joy nee Merilee Marsello put the telescope-esque looking device up to her eye.
“...looks like more waiting around, girls.” Athena Marsello had the sort of face that many women would envy deeply: even near ten years on and knocking on the door of her 30’s, she still could have passed for a newly turned adult. Maybe it had something to do with her minuscule time manipulating powers, as she looked through her own binoculars, or what looked like binoculars. “Looks like others have decided to mostly set up to the right. Playing it safe.”
“Never a bad thing. Sticking your neck out should be for crises, not for mycies.” Joy said.
“What?” Vimmy furrowed her brow.
“Mycies. Ihmensel’jk word. Basically means laudings. Props. Praise.” Joy said.
“Oh. So taking risks just to impress others is stupid.” Athena said.
“More or less.” Joy said.
“I’m certain there are no hypocrites here in that regard.” Athena said.
“If we judged everyone jus’by the choices in their youth, the world would be a very different and probably more miserable place.” Joy said.
“Ain’t THAT the truth.” Vimmy and Venny only knew the barebones Athena Marsello story. She’d been the first to show up amongst the Kobbers once the strange alternations of how time passed had been discovered (and since stabilized, in a sense), and unfortunately she’d made a mess and caused a lot of unneeded drama, and her name was still kinda dirty in a ‘best to not keep stirring the pot’ sense. “Well, might as well keep showing you what I know about non-risking of necks, Vimmy, Venny.”
“OBSERVATION AND DEDUCTION.” Joy said dramatically.
“It’s essentially always the core of it, Merry.”
“OBSERVATION AND DEE-DUC-TION….!” Joy had apparently heard this refrain a lot, as she wandered over to adjust something in her mechanical horse.
“Oh, we know that thing!” Vimmy said. Celeste had spoken of it during a hunt for a killer ‘slasher’.
“Well, good. But there’s a third, actually. Information. But yes. You get into any sort of investigation business, especially when it comes to bad deeds, and well…observation and deduction. See it, understand it. Even if you’ve gotten a heads up, Aunt Celeste I assume, It’s harder than it looks. ESPECIALLY for you two.”
“Well, what can we say? We’re like ogres and onions, we’ve got layers.” Venny shrugged, holding her hands up. “For us, we kept hearing the same word over and over when we were coming up: Awareness. Awareness, awareness, awareness, until it turned into nonsense syllables. I think it mostly stuck. Mostly. Not quite perfect by any means…”
“Oh, god, I remember that.” Vimmy rolled her eyes, taking them off the spot in the distance to turn around. “...You know, for all that, I’m grateful for it being drummed in. At least we learned to look around once in awhile, even if we do have a bad case of tunnel vision every now and then.”
“Well, who doesn’t?” Venny shrugged again. As they chattered she looked over Athena and Joy again, not quite assessing but moreso because she wasn’t all that familiar with them yet. “...Although admittedly, sticking our necks out is why we’re here now, so I guess it’s good with the bad.”
Vimmy kicked a rock and then stretched, spreading her wingblades behind her. “I’m thinking playing it safe might be a good idea in this case…”
“What, you scared?” Venny grinned, Vimmy immediately turning to her. “No! Just, well, it’s not the wind that’s the danger. It’s what’s in the wind and where it sends you. I don’t have a Radiance that’ll eat a crash like you do.”
“...I can’t argue with that. Neither of our shielding systems are gonna like hitting solid ground.” Venny acknowledged.
“If neither of you were scared, I’d be calling this off right now.” Joy called over.
“And I wasn’t talking about the weather for observation and deduction. I know your father. He wants information given out by EVERYONE. His kids in his mind must do their best to be little sponges.” Well, ATHENA seemed to think Christopher had formally adopted them in every way. It was still more complicated than that, but it was a nice thought nonetheless. “Maybe he can teach you ten million ways to hit stuff-”
“You know he’s more layered than that.” Joy said.
“Like any good ogre. Fine. Two million ways. But well, sometimes it’s hard to see what to hit. Or where it is.” Athena went digging through her pockets, finally pulling out what looked like a needle. “Going to need a light image here…”
A smaller version of what the two girls had seen with the riddle tests. Except this image was more basic: a footprint.
“Like I said. Information is the important third. I just show you this and go ‘Tell me what you see’, you’ll be at a loss because there’s no context. So. This footprint was found at the site of something bad. That’s your information. Now. Observe and deduct.”
As said, neither had corrected Athena, both because it was complicated and because it was a nice thought; Both of them had made acknowledging, comfortable sort of gestures at her instead before turning to the image.
“...Well, it’s a footprint.” Vimmy started.
“From a foot.” Venny supplied. Vimmy poked her and she relented. “Right, obviously the ground was soft enough to have footprints be somewhat clear and present, so there’s that. The heel is a little more there than the rest.”
“...The ball part of it isn’t as there, so they weren’t flat- well, flat footed.” Vimmy pointed out. She’d been about to suggest they were running, but something stopped her, namely the realization people didn’t run on their heels…
“...If the heel is more defined than the rest of the foot, they were pressing on that part more, so they were-” She made the motion to confirm it for herself. “Were they stopping? Or backing up?”
“Must’ve been, if they left a print behind. ‘Cause if they were just going backward they’d turn around first, right? Instead?” It was Venny’s turn to point something out.
“You’re right. Guy tried to trick people by walking backwards. But if I hadn’t said ‘this happened at a bad place’, you might not have figured that out, because you needed that little extra bit to think ‘maybe they walked backwards’ because you’d need a reason WHY they’d do that. And basically, any sort of investigation is based on breaking down everything into singles and then figuring out links. Like this…”
As Weav didn’t really have photography, Athena produced an in-depth sketch of a wrecked room.
“This room was trashed. The trashers were looking for something. What were they looking for?”
Both dragons leaning forward to stare, they eyed the sketch in silence at first; Neither one wanted to be the one to remark that they’d been on the other side of trashing a room and tearing it apart to find something of value. The trouble was, depending on the circumstances there could just be a ton of destruction and a single actual goal, or a lot of sloppy tearing apart until the thing was found…
“What were they looking for… Well, nothing on the surface. Stuff like clothes, the obvious things inside a drawer, you don’t rip through a room without bothering to check the first places people put things just in case to save yourself the time.” Venny pointed out. “And even then, if you’re just breaking things to break things you wouldn’t bother…”
“Closet’s open, clothes are scattered, the bed’s moved, you can see where it was- So it wasn’t petty thief stuff, or they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble. What’s the point of taking small valuables if you’re just gonna get caught in ten minutes?” Vimmy wondered, narrowing her eyes. Both had started to pick out individual pieces and features that were out of place on the sketch, but it was like a forest for the trees. “My first guess is money, because it’s money a lot of the time for this sort of thing, but I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, same principle. You don’t wreck a room just to take a stash unless you know there’s a good enough chance you’re not going to go down for it or it’s entirely personal. Hmm. This is a tough one.” Venny admitted, putting her hands on her hips. “Obviously it’s something they could take with them, whether they could conceal it or not- It’s not like they were going to carry a whole entire safe in their arms and no one would ask a question.”
“I wonder if it’s information related- You see the books? Are any missing? Some are damaged, but some aren’t, like they were just tossed aside.” Vimmy muttered to her. As with a lot of puzzles, together they were puzzling it out, but ultimately…
“I think you’ve got us here. There’s just too many maybes and possibilities. What was it?” Venny asked, looking to Athena.
“How many separate objects can you two make out?”
A brief moment of calculation between the two.
“92. Give or take 1 or 2.”
“My report had 57. That’s what I meant by your observation being trouble. You can pick out and see so many small things and keep track of them that maybe I’d miss, but in this case, it just confused you, didn’t it? Muddied the waters. Now, it wasn’t like I figured it out in two minutes. I had a friend and we had to look over things for an hour before we figured it out. The key was the chairs. See how badly they’re broken? Not just in pieces. Multiple chair legs have been broken. Which we concluded meant that they were looking for something small enough that could be hidden in a chair leg. It was: a vial of a certain kind of dust. But, even with the information we had when he and I were looking it over, we had to get that through deduction.”
“DEEEEEE DUCKKKKK SHIIOONNNNNN!” Joy called.
“I tried to teach Joy. As you can see, she decided the repeating meant it should be mocked. Look, I’m not trying to make you feel dumb. When I got the interest to learn this I was much worse than you two are, or did. I just thought, beyond your father wanting you to be sponges, well, uh, did they do the throw the thing at you out of nowhere thing?”
Oh yes. Celeste and her knife.
“Uncle Christopher…well, however much weight you want to give me, I say, he’s got a lot of strength and talent, but he’s got a bit of a weakness too. His preferences, his ways, his tips and tricks, they’re very heavy on the snap. Reacting ASAP. Catch thrown weapons. Assess threats and move in before there’s been three blinks of the eye. I’m sure you’ve seen it. He’s good at it and good with it. He taught it to my mother after all. But when you were looking at this picture, didn’t you feel like there was a clock ticking and if you didn’t get an answer real fast, you felt like you were failing?”
“I, well- I mean, y’know, we-” Venny started, looking for a way to sidle diplomatically past it before seeing there wasn’t one. “Maybe just a hair. Even in our past lives we sort of relied on that second to second snap decision type way of thinking, especially in the field. Nothing like now, it’s not really comparable, but… Yeah. There’s always a clock ticking somewhere, isn’t there?”
“You should’ve seen us with some of the logic puzzles they’ve shown to us. We’d get them eventually, mostly.” Vimmy admitted sheepishly.
“Don’t worry about us feeling dumb, we’re doing a lot of fish out of water type things but getting used to them piece by piece. It’s fine.” Venny waved her hand. “...I can’t say I don’t see your point, because we’d have read that picture to pieces- probably started deep scanning it with our different vision modes after an hour or so- but it’s just one of those things, I guess. We’re good at the snap stuff, and we’re getting better, but there’s always something else to pick up. ”
“And snap stuff will carry you a lot. But it’s not a key for every lock. Once you’re starting to feel comfortable with instant reactions, just…look into trying things that take time. Because sometimes, well, deciding something on the reaction of an instant is a bad thing.”
“She speaks from personal experience. Ask the Kobbers about the Medusa incident. That all came from…what was it, two small bad experiences?”
“What they WERE. To me they were a lot bigger. Making a snap decision ended up making them actually big.”
“Speaking of big, wind’s shifting. I think we’re about to get a rider.”
“Good. I need to get off heavy stuff.” Athena pulled the tarp off her gear. What appeared to be a surfboard, and twin ‘flight sticks’ that had lengths that could go slack or rigid, that she began snapping into the base. “Okay. We told you all the basic safety stuff for rough-riding, and you two can actually FLY, while we’re faking it and all…but we’ve actually done this before. You think of anything to review, Merry?”
“Worst comes to worst? Like, you’re helplessly caught in the suction? Don’t fight it. Go with it. Use it to slingshot-snap yourself back out before you get fully sucked into the twirl. You’ll probably go real far, but assuming your wings don’t break or whatever, you can probably get control and land safely, or turn around and come back. I’d say that applies more to you, Vimmy. And if you want, I can TRY and lasso you. It MIGHT work in a crisis, but it also might end up a tug of war that we’d all lose. Just keep that stuff in mind.” Joy said, having discarded her hat and put on a sort of jumpsuit over her usual shirt and pants, also putting goggles on as her adopted sister handed them over. “Don’t worry about us if the wind dies, we know how to glide down. Unless we start screaming in fear. THEN you can worry. And help us, saying the obvious. And until you get some experience here, I will say the obvious again. Don’t be trying to impress anyone, yourselves, us, those others, your dad and mom, forget it. Learn first. Show off later.”
Joy’s hair was now snapping around, caught in the incoming wind. Athena had tied her own in tight braids behind her head.
“Now, normally we’d do a running start and jump in and then get on the boards, but you girls can muck with gravity. You mind giving us a toss?”
Taking a deep breath, Venny nodded and put some of the run of thoughts out of her mind. “No problem! Vimmy, you wanna…?”
“I sure do! Get ready for a heave-ho.” She said, forming up alongside her sister. There was no sudden crackle or discharge around their arms, but as they made a hefting and then hurling motion from underhand the forces slaved to their systems activated all at once, letting them lift Joy and Athena up and into the air without quite sending them flying one after the other. Venny probably could have done it by herself, but she’d wanted Vimmy to have a chance practicing her own fine tuned control. They watched them go for a second before she turned to her. “Now, are you ready?”
“As ready as I’m going to be. This is pretty crazy, huh?” Vimmy asked, smiling shakily. She wasn’t going to show real fear in front of anyone else, but in the moment she didn’t begrudge it since she could see the same shine in her sister’s eyes. Venny nodded before laughing a little. “Yeah… But it’s going to be fun as all hell, too.”
“Well, then what are we sitting down here waiting for?” Vimmy asked, before lighting up into the air, Venny following after her a moment later. Their hair whipped around even as they used their tails to adjust their courses, horns splitting the air in their path while they went into the winds.
Air surfing on a tornado’s radius.
You get your fun where you find it.
----
-Oriam, The Main Tech City of Weav. Another Outing, Another Time-
It was funny. Considering how anti social Christopher was in a lot of ways, he seemed to know a lot of people. Otherwise, it would have taken several days of travel to get here, instead of the six hours via air travel that the three had used. Christopher had told the girls to keep track of the process and direction, so they’d know the way if they ever had to fly here themselves.
Like any good advanced city, Oriam had layers. It had its shiny topside, its more muted middle, and its darker underside; while said underside was less dangerous than some cities carved in the vein of Oriam, there was still a lot of nooks and crannies where you had to be careful if you went there, as well as pockets of rot and danger; no city of this size was perfect. The fact that the girls had been taken into a building that seemed to be selling some kind of bottled product, let in the back, gone down through a ladder into some worn tunnels below (which had been a tight squeeze for the girls and required them to work out how to compress their bodies as much as they could to fit), then finding a second door and entering into what was very clearly a side passageway for a main sewer system, Christopher leading them through a few more twists and turns before they came to what appeared to be a large, rusted metal door. The rust was a cover: Christopher slid aside a hidden panel and entered a code, and the door opened as smoothly as any of the doors located below.
Beyond it was a series of labs and workspaces that could have been in Dawn’s home, though it was not QUITE as high tech. More rustic and natural, a dollop of a witch’s cauldron space, with lots of drawn charts. It was odd to see such items without a lot of obvious plugs and wall outlets: whatever these machines ran on, it seemed to have its power withdrawal methods more concealed.
The woman who greeted them would have had a lot harder time of concealing herself if she operated up in more visible spaces. The two girls had been told she was ‘mostly a doctor’, but she was dressed much more like a mechanic. And was nearly seven feet tall, and that was with her posture hunched over, as she was walking with a pair of medical canes. Her eyes were sunk so far into her skull that it seemed amazing she could see, and her skin was a stark chalk white, her hair a hard coiled mass that seemed less like follicles and more like the wires that made up the nets the dragon girls had recently had experience with. Dr. Lucca Chalice didn’t have the most welcoming expression, though based on what the girls saw, she probably never had a welcoming expression.
“So, the Ravensky has decided to shove some dirt off the grave he stuck me in to make sure my choking’s still going on.”
“Don’t be dramatic, Chalice.” The two had some history, which the girls only knew a few small details of. Chalice had been involved in some worse things when she’d been younger, and it was why she was walking with those canes. Christopher was involved, though whether he’d had a hand in the canes and why she needed them now, he had not said. Christopher clearly didn’t think they were FRIENDS, or even acquaintances, but he seemed to trust her judgment on certain things that he and his wife didn’t have enough knowledge in. “And SHE picked this location, I will note.”
“Because if I didn’t pick something that appealed to his sense of JUSTICE, he’d probably have cut m’legs off at the knees to make sure I couldn’t run away.”
“These are the two girls, if you hadn’t guessed.” Christopher just moved on, not responding to Chalice’s accusations. “Whatever you gleaned from my messages, I think you can learn a lot more from an in-depth examination. I take it I’m not interrupting anything important.”
“Like you would care if you were.”
“...you do have me there. Well, unless something is about to explode, get to it.” Christopher thunked down a small box. The girls knew what that was: a Terrae bundle. He was paying the woman. She seemed a mite surprised that she was getting ANYTHING, before she resumed her innate grumbling and began herding the girls with her canes to go into a side room.
SEVERAL HOURS OF VARIOUS PHYSICALS AND WHATNOT LATER.
“Well, I have to admit, Ravensky. You have found yourself a pair.”
“That we have. What did you find?”
“Some very interesting things.” The woman walked over to one of the charted walls, removing a few of said charts and laying them aside. “This IS where I…yes.
“This is the biology of a human. And this is the biology of one of its distant evolutionary cousins, the chimpanzee.” It seemed like evolution was still understood and followed to some degree on Weav, as Chalice had pulled down a slide showing off the bodies of both. “Now, it is concealed by their fur, but as you can see…”
Some ‘magic trick’ to strip away the fur, revealing that a chimpanzee was a mass of ripped muscle.
“They are very well formed when it comes to muscle. I don’t suppose either of you know anything about human or primate biology?”
Sitting like mirror images of each other, hands clasped and pert, Venny nodded while Vimmy shook her head. Neither wanted to stare at Chalice since it would’ve been rude. They glanced at one another to decide who would speak first before Venny took the initiative. “Well… Yes and no. We- How to put this… We know about small details, but mostly just to make us better killers. Where the main veins are, aim for center mass, that sort of thing.”
“I’d say we know less about biology than we do know, if that makes any sense. Like, it’s not something we’ve studied, but we know some really basic basics.” Vimmy explained further. “So you can pretty much assume, no, we don’t know much at all.”
Venny nodded to agree.
“...I see why you’re in Ravensky’s company.”
“No editorializing, Chalice.”
“I suppose. Now, chimpanzees are very rare these days, and they cannot tap the Stream like some animals have demonstrated capability for. But there are crude records that in the days before the Stream, chimpanzees could be incredibly dangerous and easily tear the average human limb from limb, or chew off their faces. And they don’t have a mouth of fangs, so that’s saying something. There’s more to it than just the muscles, though. It’s the fine design OF the muscles. And the body it’s attached to.
“The chimpanzee’s body is primarily what is known as ‘fast-twitch’ muscle fibers. Built towards strength. Swinging through trees without issue. Humans, on the other hand, have ‘slow-twitch’ muscle fibers. Geared more towards endurance. Your species, in the ancient days before we separated into further groups, went in the endurance direction. And other non-strength directions. Fine motor control, for one. And your brains. Our brains. They need lots of energy. Energy that gets taken away from the muscles. So, while a chimpanzee could rip a man apart if the man had nothing, man often had sharp pointy sticks. And fire. That’s why you lot won out on the whole take over the world thing.
“Now…you two started as humans, so you have a human structure. But…your artificial muscles…they’re neither slow or fast twitch. They’re basically a fusion. You literally have the best of both worlds. AND your bodies produce so much energy that neither your body or your brains need to prioritize. It’s absolutely amazing…and kind of scary.”
“More advanced than my setup, as well.” Christopher said.
“Christopher’s setup is pure marriage of machine and flesh. You two are ‘how can we take machines and make them as much like flesh as possible’ and emphasize the strengths. Basically…we think you’re stronger in physical terms than even you realize. That you unconsciously are holding back because you think like humans. If I know Christopher, he’s already mentally mapping some way for you to learn to try and adjust your thought process.”
“If just so you don’t make mistakes.” Christopher said.
“You can manipulate gravity? I was thinking along the lines that you could subject both yourself and your enemy to magnified gravity, and you could move more freely and use that to defeat your opponent. You might not have given it much thought because you assumed your strength and the readings your machines tell you say you can’t…but I’ve looked at what you’re made of and I say that yes, you could.”
“Since you can’t lift weights like your mother did.”
“That…” Venny put a hand to her chin and considered the matter. “That does make some sense. For us, our cybernetics and systems were put in early so we wouldn’t need to have them swapped out or upgraded over the years. They wouldn’t quite grow with us, obviously, but it’s more like the longer we have them the more our bodies would acclimate. That’s why we have all our organs and that sort of thing, we’re being artificially assisted instead of outright parts replaced. I’ve actually, well, I’ve used my own gravity to make myself heavier and then struggled through it before, working on punching and moving.”
“We WERE pretty much made to be unstoppable in our objectives and things like that.” Vimmy said slowly. “Do you really think we’re that strong?” She asked, looking between Chalice and Christopher both.
“No, that actually makes some sense. If all our readings and systems were telling us our full bore the whole time, it’d be like a human going full bore all the time. Things tearing and ripping and huge problems down the road. I know I’ve done some things I shouldn’t have been able to do, haven’t you too?” She asked her sister. Vimmy blinked and considered it.
“Well… Yeah, but I thought, I guess I just didn’t notice. Mostly it was always when I was, uh, under a lot of stress or really angry or things like that. I just chalked it up to that, being enraged or something. I used to be angry a lot of the time.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. The mouth you had on you…” Venny looked down at her hands. “I couldn’t tell you the exact mechanics of our enhancements, mostly just model names and the basics, but… Thinking it over, we really don’t know our own top ends. It’s always been enough to do what we did with what we had, it’s only rarely we had to push ourselves to our max.”
“Well, I’ve analyzed what I can manage and collected it in a record. If anyone can figure out how to make you draw more out of yourself, it’s the bastard behind you.”
“No editorials.”
“Oh believe me, Ravensky, it’s a compliment.”
“That is often depending on where you’re standing.”
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