Re: Chapter I - Sword and Shield
Posted: Thu Jun 13, 2013 7:42 am
Frank hopped into the crook of her arm, which would have looked cute if he didn't look like a bloated hand-puppet covered in scraggly hair that was too coarse to ever be combed or shaped into anything conclusive.
The back lot was a simple fenced-in expanse of some ten by six feet, sham warnings about guard dogs or automated defense systems being affixed to the wires facing outside. The ground wasn't much more than cracked soil, dead or dying grass, oil stains and the faint glowing rivulets of leaking plasma cells. Earth authorities tended to freak out about this – some transeuranic weaponry produced non-energetic plasma as a byproduct and the end result was fairly infectious – but any Drifter would know enough to simply de-louse his or her boots with a pressure nozzle after a day at the junkyard. Little by little, practical safety tips were being introduced to Earth natives who came into possession of advanced tech, and you could find a few dozen YouTube videos on why carrying minute quantities of non-blood-based plasma in your veins wouldn't necessarily kill you.
Okay – so you'd maybe glow a bit or turn into some sort of walking disease and radiation vector – but you'd otherwise be fine!
The units Frank had referred to were about the size of a fridge – Warden designs and blueprints re-interpreted by the distant descendants of their inmates and prisoners. Still, a keen Grayskin would have spotted one or two elements lifted from another design of theirs – suggesting that on Paradise, even ideas weren't sacred.
Still held aloft by Tam, Frank reached out to one of the units' controls and punched in some sort of code, old Paradise graffiti-slash-glyphs lighting up in a numerical sequence they'd probably be the only two people to understand in a rather wide radius around the pawn shop. With a hiss, the drive opened up and liberated a thick plume of biting, cooled gas that deposited beads of perspiration on the Blueskin's epidermis, hot and cold intermingling as they are wont to do. Frank, on the other hand, tried not to show how he'd recoiled deeper into Tam's arm, closer to her armpit. Cold could be dangerous to his vital gases, so they'd be better off waiting for the drive's inner components to cool down.
As was suggested by the name, and in such a way as to make any Doctor Who fan salivate in anticipation – the inside of the drive was much, much larger than what the fridge-sized object should have allowed. In there waited more shelves and more disparate bits of tech, essentially multiplying the shop's available floor space while not taking more real-estate than your average row of four or five porta-potties.
“Gang leaders and mobster dignitaries use these for all sorts of purposes,” Brenner explained. “Extra storage, panic rooms, luxurious and palatial escape pods, portable office spaces or reasonably movable hotel rooms... I've tried to put them on sale legitimately, but the local arcane community just – babbled something about how I was tampering with the laws of physics and maybe pissing off something from Outside that could reach In or – I don't know. Some other witch-y gobbledygook like that. I've used these for years and I still haven't seen anything like cosmic horrors or fabled Warden survivors,” he said, scoffing in amusement at the end.
“The point is, this is where all the leery stuff goes. The drives you'd better leave to pros or the fuel injection manifolds that were creatively obtained from top-of-the-line orbital skiffs from back home. Nothing illegal, like I said – but absolutely not stuff you'd sell to the first rube looking to assemble his first personal robotic assistant.”
He then seemed to remember something. “Speaking of – we service implants, here. We don't sell them. Same with AI subroutines, if anyone asks. I can jailbreak someone's Information Agent or their search engine crawler; get it to look for porn or cracked software or hacking essentials, whatever – but I'm not allowed to code anything custom. We also can't carry commercial models, either.”
He looked up to her. “You'll see weirdos come in with all sorts of disgusting fetishes, because of that. If Joe Somebody wants his Google to look like Betty Boop, we can do that. If he wants his Betty Boop to give a little extra by interfacing with his nervous system implants – kindly tell him to go take a long walk off a short cliff, da?”
The back lot was a simple fenced-in expanse of some ten by six feet, sham warnings about guard dogs or automated defense systems being affixed to the wires facing outside. The ground wasn't much more than cracked soil, dead or dying grass, oil stains and the faint glowing rivulets of leaking plasma cells. Earth authorities tended to freak out about this – some transeuranic weaponry produced non-energetic plasma as a byproduct and the end result was fairly infectious – but any Drifter would know enough to simply de-louse his or her boots with a pressure nozzle after a day at the junkyard. Little by little, practical safety tips were being introduced to Earth natives who came into possession of advanced tech, and you could find a few dozen YouTube videos on why carrying minute quantities of non-blood-based plasma in your veins wouldn't necessarily kill you.
Okay – so you'd maybe glow a bit or turn into some sort of walking disease and radiation vector – but you'd otherwise be fine!
The units Frank had referred to were about the size of a fridge – Warden designs and blueprints re-interpreted by the distant descendants of their inmates and prisoners. Still, a keen Grayskin would have spotted one or two elements lifted from another design of theirs – suggesting that on Paradise, even ideas weren't sacred.
Still held aloft by Tam, Frank reached out to one of the units' controls and punched in some sort of code, old Paradise graffiti-slash-glyphs lighting up in a numerical sequence they'd probably be the only two people to understand in a rather wide radius around the pawn shop. With a hiss, the drive opened up and liberated a thick plume of biting, cooled gas that deposited beads of perspiration on the Blueskin's epidermis, hot and cold intermingling as they are wont to do. Frank, on the other hand, tried not to show how he'd recoiled deeper into Tam's arm, closer to her armpit. Cold could be dangerous to his vital gases, so they'd be better off waiting for the drive's inner components to cool down.
As was suggested by the name, and in such a way as to make any Doctor Who fan salivate in anticipation – the inside of the drive was much, much larger than what the fridge-sized object should have allowed. In there waited more shelves and more disparate bits of tech, essentially multiplying the shop's available floor space while not taking more real-estate than your average row of four or five porta-potties.
“Gang leaders and mobster dignitaries use these for all sorts of purposes,” Brenner explained. “Extra storage, panic rooms, luxurious and palatial escape pods, portable office spaces or reasonably movable hotel rooms... I've tried to put them on sale legitimately, but the local arcane community just – babbled something about how I was tampering with the laws of physics and maybe pissing off something from Outside that could reach In or – I don't know. Some other witch-y gobbledygook like that. I've used these for years and I still haven't seen anything like cosmic horrors or fabled Warden survivors,” he said, scoffing in amusement at the end.
“The point is, this is where all the leery stuff goes. The drives you'd better leave to pros or the fuel injection manifolds that were creatively obtained from top-of-the-line orbital skiffs from back home. Nothing illegal, like I said – but absolutely not stuff you'd sell to the first rube looking to assemble his first personal robotic assistant.”
He then seemed to remember something. “Speaking of – we service implants, here. We don't sell them. Same with AI subroutines, if anyone asks. I can jailbreak someone's Information Agent or their search engine crawler; get it to look for porn or cracked software or hacking essentials, whatever – but I'm not allowed to code anything custom. We also can't carry commercial models, either.”
He looked up to her. “You'll see weirdos come in with all sorts of disgusting fetishes, because of that. If Joe Somebody wants his Google to look like Betty Boop, we can do that. If he wants his Betty Boop to give a little extra by interfacing with his nervous system implants – kindly tell him to go take a long walk off a short cliff, da?”