thisavrou | - VIDEO - set in a dark little workshop -

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uncharted: nathan drake

- VIDEO - set in a dark little workshop -

So, for those of you who have been living under a rock, the Ingress is down for maintenance. [She pauses for effect, but not dramatic effect. In fact, just in case anyone is in doubt about how underwhelmed she is, she adds a sarcastic,] Ohhh noooooo.

[But she knocks it off a moment later.] Which... kinda makes me wonder why there's only one Ingress? I mean, this is what technology does. The motherboard fries, the battery dies, the motor overloads and catches the engine compartment on fire, it goes obsolete because the manufacturer decided to remove headphone jacks -- that's the circle of life. Or should I say... circuit of life?

[There's a notification sound from her TAB. She picks it up, and scowls a little at what she sees.]

... aw, c'mon, my pun wasn't that bad.

[She huffs and sets it back down.] AN-y-way, maybe this is the perfect time to roll out something to replace it? Something, let's say... personal?

Y'see, I've already been reverse engineering Hyperion's digistruction tech, and -- [she says with increasing enthusiasm] -- it took a lot of time to get the atomic reconstruction matrix right, but now that it's stopped turning my hats into jello, I think it's juuuust about ready to scale up, and start warping living things from place to place.

Lemme show you! Imagine that this is you. [She sets a toy robot down in front of the camera.] And imagine that table over there is the other planet! All we have to do is digistruct you down like so...

[She holds a device over the doll. It appears to scan it, and then disintegrate it down into blocks of light. A mildly terrifying thought, maybe.]

[Gaige picks up the TAB and moves it over to the far table.] Then, we have a second digistructor which beams all your data over to the destination, and -- voila!

[She presses a button, and the robot reappears, as if it were being reassembled out of the blocks of light. However, there's a small problem: It's not on the table. Instead, it's about five feet to the left, sticking halfway into the wall. Its feet dangle down helplessly.]

... okay. Maybe it still has a few bugs to work out before we start using it on living things. Just-- give me a few hours to redo the calibration--

[And the camera's off again.]

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[So Zer0, right. Over the past liiiiike month or so, he's been pretty scarce around Vault house for a few reasons that he hasn't mentioned like. At all. That's how Zer0 rolls or something. He's popped in today, though, knocking lightly on Gaige's door before peeking in-

and immediately seeing the little doll sticking out of the wall.]

...Nailed it.

[Gaige you little mad scientist, you.]

... I mean, yeah. I did nail it into the wall, kinda.

[She steps back to get a better look at her handiwork, even making a 'frame' with her fingers.]

I don't think I could use it to hang a picture, though!

[Zer0's just gonna step his butt into the room here don't mind him.]

No, probably not. / Seems you've been keeping busy, / Have things been quiet?

[Wow, yes, she does mind? Zer0 you're such a huge guy, how is she even supposed to walk around with you here??]

[Which is sarcasm-ese for: Why would she mind? He's like a human pool noodle.]

Ehhh, not really quiet? But... [She makes a weird, disgruntled sound.] I'm keeping out of it, at least for now. Apparently some of the robots aren't really robots here, and there's all this stuff about artificial intelligence and artificial life... I don't know.

It's weird, and it's getting into heavy stuff, and I spent most of my Engineering Ethics courses doodling designs for laser chainsaws.

[We don't know if he's a human pool noodle he could be an alien pool noodle or a robot pool noodle IT IS A MYSTERY

And yyyyeahhh Zer0 doesn't know anything about robots that aren't robots or AIs or whatever. Unless Sideswipe counts. He probably doesn't though he's basically a giant 16 year old. Artificial life he mmmmight? have a better idea about. Look he's been getting into some pretty fucked up shit lately.]

Keeping out of it / Might be the wise thing to do. / Nothing's as it seems.

...Laser chainsaws?

[Like where can he get one]

[Maybe he's just a bunch of pool noodles tied together. It is completely possible.]

Well, yeah. One of my subscribers asked me how to build a laser sword once, right? And even though that sounds cool, it'd never really work. You could make something that looked like it, like a digistruction blade, since that's kinda like cutting through matter with antimatter, but -- lasers are fired out, so you can't really -- [She tries explaining with her hands, shaping out an invisible sword's edge.] -- it's like asking for a sword made of bullets, you know?

But, then I started thinking! If you had a bunch of little lasers that kept moving, they would slice the same spot over and over, and they could cut through things just like a blade! And so, boom! Laser chainsaw!

[That's cool and all, and Zer0's gonna let you finish, but first Zer0's gonna hold a hand up all wait a minute]

Let's go back to the sword made of bullets.

What? Do you want one?

I mean, the whole point of that example -- Zer0, that is not a possible thing. Bullets mostly hurt because they're moving really, really fast. You can't really cut with them.

But I could...? [She waves her hands around, helplessly.] Maybe make a sword that's also a gun barrel, so it can shoot bullets? Or a sword where you can shoot the blade? I don't know. What're you thinking of?

[Zer0 crosses his arms, shaking his head slightly with a :3 popping up from his faceplate. lol dude]

I was just kidding. / Was it not that obvious? / I should work on that.

Obvious? Uhhhhh.

This might be a huge newsflash to you, but you are really hard to read sometimes. Like, zodiac killer level cryptic. ... only sometimes.

But I mean like, there are times where I wonder how much you take this whole secret, mysterious assassin thing seriously. Or whether you're just playing it up so you can laugh your ass off at the rest of us.

Before Pandora, / My life was a lot different. / I am... adapting.

[Sure he murdered people basically all the time but now he's actually having fun doing it with some buddies. Times change bro]

So, what I'm getting from this is that your dark, secret backstory was all about trying to make a living in the stand-up biz.

Sure, something like that. / Only there were more murders, / Mostly boring ones.

If you kill a guy during a stand-up routine, is that prop comedy?

[SERIOUS QUESTION HERE.]

Yes, and it segues / To my ventriloquist act. / I'm quite good at it.

No way.

Is that why we don't see your face? Are you really just a puppet-man, being controlled by some unknown ventriloquist?

A great performer / Never reveals their secrets. / Perhaps someday, though.

There's only one Ingress because they mass murdered everyone else that created their own Ingress and maintain control over their single one.

[You're welcome.]

[Even though, that.... doesn't seem to turn out as well as she intended.]

Brutal.

[... she, um... she really shouldn't sound amused by that. But no, she seems pretty focused on reworking her designs that may or may not land her on that very same "mass murdered" list.]

[At least she's good at talking while she works.]

So, is it just the designs they're trying to keep under wraps, or movement? Because either way, still doesn't sound like a bad choice to rethink the approach.

It's access to the Ingress itself that is an issue for them. For whatever reasons, whether it's that they feel no one else can handle the technology or they want to maintain a monopoly they maintain a scorched Earth policy.

[They disposed of a lot of bodies in an Ingress research facility, and that had stuck with him.]

But if you can find a workaround without using the actual Ingress? That might be preferable. And hopefully pretty reliable.

[He's behind the idea so long as it doesn't set off the government's security protocols.]

Sooo, even the "why" is sort of confidential? When you put it that way, it makes me want to go see inside there for myself.

[She looks up from her work, turning her attention up towards a corner of a room. As if she's changed tracks of thought, and she's following the new direction with her eyes.]

But it's also a really good reason to flip the bird to those guys, and work out something that they had nothing to do with.

I'm behind the idea. I say go for it.

I remember the Ingress was said to be... I think it was "living energy". It corrupted the last person that figured it out, badly. So better to dodge that course anyway.

[Honestly, he wonders if there are similarly corrupted Savrii.]

Either way, you have my support. I can't offer more than seeking out contacts, but I do support it.

I'll take it. A +1 is a +1.

But as a woman of science, I'm obligated to keep bugging you with questions, especially when you casually drop phrases like "living energy" in the conversation.

So, just to clarify: Are we talking about soul-type energy, here? Because people have said that's a thing, and it's -- [she laughs nervously] -- it's sort of made me ask a lot of questions about all this that I really didn't ever want to be asking.

I saw no solid definition given for it, but I've vaguely assumed it to mean either that it's somewhat sentient or it needs to consume and spread.

Someone capable of detecting 'magic' said she identified some from it, and scientists have found other quantifiable traits. But that's all I know so far.

Oh, weird. So you mean like an energy-based creature? Because that's moving things just far enough to the sci-fi end of the supernatural scale for me.

Like... 'magic'? That's fine for a tabletop game, or a cartoon show. But here in the real world, we can observe things and collect data on it, and give it names that sound smarter. Like ...telepathy, or pyrokinesis, or... phaselocking, just for example.

I have no idea how that works, but if you think it might help, bring it to the techs working on the problem. I really don't wanna die because the planet froze over.

Oh, it's easy! Just imagine a computer disassembling your body at the sub-atomic level, then shipping it like a big data packet to a new location, and reassembling it at the new location.

Once it's all set, you can die anywhere and anyway that you want!

[He really, really doesn't want to imagine that.]

Just like that, huh. Real easy.

That easy! And hey, if you don't want to die at all? It's great at taking the lethally injured and putting them back together.

Though it probably wouldn't help if you were dropped right back in a frozen wasteland, right after.

Yeaaaaah...most things don't do so well with that.

Your world must be an interesting place.

[She snickers at that.]

My world? No, I come from a boring place called Eden-5. Well, usually boring. It could be more exciting if more people didn't turn a blind eye to all the political corruption... but I digress.

The real place to be is Pandora. It's a fantastic shithole.

People always turn a blind eye to political corruption, far as I can tell.

[Not that he's much better, being pretty apolitical himself.]

Like the box?

Well... probably, yeah? I mean, I'm talking about the planet. And I don't know why they named it Pandora, but if I had to guess, I'd say the Vaults there might've had something to do with it.

It's a real no-mans land, though. Kill-or-be-killed.

I've been in some places like that. Looking for vaults, too.

You're a Vault Hunter, too? I didn't think we had any others here! I mean, especially since you seem so...

[What's a good word.]

... normal. Wait, you're not talking about some other kinda vault, are you?

I guess that's one word for it.

[Treasure hunter/professional thief is what he'd call it, but 'vault hunter' sounds close enough.]

I don't think so? Why, how many kinds are there?

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- VIDEO - set in a dark little workshop -

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[can you imagine a July 4th sponsored by torgue]

July 4th more like July TORGUETH i tried

[it was a good attempt]

[good thank you]

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