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we’re ready to make you one of us.

WHO: Open to all Dualizens
WHAT: When Roboclones Attack
WHERE: Anywhere in the city!
WHEN: The night of Oct. 19
WARNINGS: Please use these if applicable! And if you happen to end up dead by roboclone, please fill out the death form!

It’s an ordinary night in Dualis, until it suddenly becomes a very dark and stormy night in Dualis. There hasn’t been a single day of unpleasant weather since any of you arrived, but soon after the sun begins to sink behind the city’s skyscrapers and the neon lights intensify for the night, storm clouds begin to gather overhead and unleash a cacophony of thunder, a deluge of rain, and brilliant spikes of lightning arcing across the sky.

It’s a violent storm, to be sure, but surely severe weather is no challenge in such a technologically advanced city as Dualis, right? As long as you stay indoors, you can keep safe and dry until the storm passes.

Except … less than an hour after the storm begins, the power all across the city goes completely out. All buildings are dark except for the illumination cast by lightning across brick and steel and glass. All electronics - including phones - are dead, all biometric locks are disabled, and no attempts to call, text, or reach the internet or the network succeed. Eerily, the streets are silent and empty.

Under normal circumstances, such a widespread blackout would merely be odd and inconvenient, but tonight, circumstances are anything but normal. About half an hour after the blackout begins, something approaches you, wherever you are. In the dark, you’ll be able to make out that its shape is humanoid, but maybe its motions are jerky and mechanical. As it draws closer and you get a better look, by candlelight or flashlight or flash of lightning, you recognize the face staring back at you.

That face is your own.

The face, like the rest of the body, is likely some degree of incomplete, an incongruous jigsaw of metal and flesh, but it’s definitely yours. And this machine doppelganger’s mission is soon made apparent as it launches a targeted attack on you:

It’s here to kill you.

After nearly four hours, the storm subsides and the power is restored and the city falls back into its normal rhythm. Will you survive until then?

May the odds be ever in your favor, friends.

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1.) The Blackout - OTA

Drifter is rarely home. He just doesn't trust people enough to sleep comfortably around them. He keeps some things there; his clothes, a small stockpile of food, some odds and ends, random gadgets purchased from second-hand stores. But hardly anything that a personal detail could be gleaned from.

It's while he's there, in the middle of quickly changing into a new outfit and buttoning up his vest, that the lights flicker dark.

Drifter pauses in the middle of pushing a decorative peg through a loop of the changshan styled vest, gaze shifting in the dark.

"Stay put," he says as a quick warning, quietly, to something unseen. He doesn't want it to show itself. "I got this."

And he holds up a jade coin of his, letting it flicker with flames originating from the glowing tips of his fingers. It lights up the room with all the enthusiasm of a zippo, but he's worked with worse. This is fine. He just has to find a way out.

He enters the halls using the coin as a 'light' for now, fingertips still faintly glowing without the Lightbearer protective gloves he's accustomed to wearing. At least anyone that he catches will have an easy light to head down the stairs, but he's like everyone else in not knowing something is coming.

2.) Raw Materials - OTA

Still dark out. There's a body laying on the street. One of the duplicates, he realizes. Piss poor things, aren't they? Lost this fight, obviously. Blood and meat peeled back from messy metal and lights. Limbs skewed in unusual ways. Hard hitter, whoever did this. Something to be admired,

Drifter stands over it and produces a knife, plants it in the thing's metal cranium, and with surprising strength forces open a piece of metal. There we go, a ton of relays. New wires that are sensitive enough to carry data from organic material. Substantial data repository.

He can dig it.

He puts his hands under the armpits and starts dragging it away to be disassembled as quickly as he can. If there are any trackers in here, he needs to strip the parts he needs and leave it on the tracks to be trashed by the first train that comes by when the power comes back on.

[ah yes, a city under attack by robots. it’s almost as if pietro never left sokovia, except the robots here are a little less obvious than ultron’s army. even so, encountering something partly metal with most of his own face had tipped pietro off that something was not right, and when the mechanical double had lunged for his throat, pietro knew this had to be a bad situation all around.

he’d left his own double a bloody heap of metal encased in flesh and sped out to the rest of the city to save whoever needed saving. drifter seems to have a handle on everything, but as pietro zips by in a blur of blue and white, something about this scene doesn’t seem entirely right, so he stops.]

What are you doing?

...Well aren't you the fast one. [Fast as hell. Pretty impressive. But that's beside the point and he knows it.]

Gonna see if there's a tracker in this thing.

[He drags it further out of the way. Yeah, it's only a portion of the truth. But it's still accurate; whoever made it probably didn't want its pet project out completely unsupervised.]

How long you think it'd take to get grafts to cover a skeleton realistically, huh? Or do you think they grew this poor bastard and yanked out the bits they weren't gonna need. Like takin' the stuffing out of a doll an' puttin' somethin' new in.

[Once he has it out of the way he wrinkles his nose and stares down at it.]

[pietro follows drifter to where he drags the robot remains, squinting in disbelief that this guy is taking the time to take a robot apart when there's an entire city under attack from other robots just like this one.]

I don't know. All of the robots I've seen before looked like robots, not people.

[and for all of the time he spent around ultron and then fighting off his army, pietro never found it important to spend time considering how they work or how they're made.]

Why do you care about how it's made?

Every place has got a different way of makin' its tech, brother. A little bit of knowledge about how it's made, the alloys, whether it's carbon or metal, grown or made, it's a hell of a thing. And this? This is metal.

[He opens up more of the skull piece he'd already pried into.]

So there's gotta be a place where it digs up the ore to make the metal. And it's gotta have a foundry where it processes the ore to make the metal.

Give me time, and I could even work out what type of cleanroom could make these chips...

[He sits hunched over the dead thing, scrutinizing it.]

South is fresh from a fight when she sees a glowing light around the corner and down the hall from her. She has a still bleeding nose and a swollen black-eye, jacket torn and untucked tank top smeared with blood and god only knows what from the fake-South.

She's technically unarmed, no weapons anyways. But her bruised and bloodied knuckles should count as a weapon, knees and boots too. Her jeans are stained, her knee might be bleeding from a few good hits to a metal head, she's a mess and fired up to rip apart whatever the hell is glowing now.

Staying quiet, South hugs to the wall, tucked just around the corner and waiting to see if this is a person or another fake-her, maybe a fake someone else? She doesn't know what the fuck is going on, but with teeth gritted and fists held tight, she's ready.

Drifter's constantly paranoid, always watching his back, too paranoid of people like the Man with the Golden Gun sneaking up on him. But it's dark as death, and he's relying on a self generated flicker of flame to see.

"Hey, I can't be the only one around..." he calls out into the stairwell. Nobody? Nothin'? Well that doesn't make any damn sense.

The doors open up downstairs on the bottom floor. He can hear them, but not see what's coming up. He passes by South without seeing her to look over the railing, holding out the coin as flames flicker around his fingertips.

"The hell is that?"

Well, he doesn’t seem like one of those... murderbots. He’s walking and talking normal for a human, even if the weird glow stick is funky. Still, she gives it a few more seconds before she decides to make herself know. First though, she’s going to quietly slip away from him a bit, get out of striking distance. If the guy is to survive at all, then he might startle at someone sneaking up on him. Or die of fright, but she’s not taking the chance.

“Is it another murder robot?” She finally speaks up, defensive pose no doubt hidden by the darkness for the moment but ready to strike if he becomes hostile instead of just startled or whatever.

Drifter startles, turning quickly. He starts to reach for his gun, asp-quick, the hand with the coin flaring even brighter.

But he stalls, seeing in the sudden brilliance that something banged her the fuck up.

"Murder robot?" He's not run into the doubles yet. "You mean the iterations? They go nuts or somethin'?" He asks as the area dims, the brightness from his hand cooling.

There is someone, or something, coming up the stairs. He can hear its feet. For now it's just walking, but what South is saying doesn't give him high hopes.

She’s listening to the approaching footsteps, but more or less figure it’ll either be a double team against any threat, or she can use him as fodder or a distraction to get the jump on who or whatever is coming. She could use him and run for cover, that is a possibility, but she doesn’t fucking run from really anything except her emotions. It’s a non-option to her, thanks.

“I don’t fucking know what it was. It...looked like me, and I’m pretty sure it was a robot.” From what she felt in the dark after it was dead, it seemed like a bot. Who the hell knows, though. “It tried you kill me, guess it copied my looks but nothing else.”

South doesn’t let her tense shoulders relax, as much as her strained and tired muscles wish she would, keeping eyes on him as she notes the steadily nearing foot falls are getting closer.

“That a friend of yours?” Fat chance seeing as his earlier reaction seemed perplexed and uneasy by the sounds as she was, but she can hope, right?

"Robots?" He asks, stepping back away from the railing and looking down the stairs. "Nah, I don't have any friends here." No offense to anyone. They're just kinda people in a lab cage together.

As he shares the sentiment, though, and does actually pull his gun now.

The feet on the stairs go from walking to running. It's sprinting up now, tirelessly, and while that's not something Drifter is unfamiliar with (Guardians never slow down) it's definitely not something that belongs here.

"Guess we're gonna find out soon enough, sister." He rolls his hand, a subtle gesture making the coin disappear. It puts them in the dark, but leaves his hand free. His ghost better damn well not show its face. He told it not to.

“Couldn’t exactly see It in the dark after I fucked it up, but what I could feel with my hands seemed like dead robot.” Metal and wires, and what could have freakishly accurately realistic fake skin but honestly her hands were pretty fucked up so comprehending textures was difficult. “Didn’t stick around to investigate more, not while it’s still dark and shit.”

She’ll probably go back later when she could see and was properly armed, but she wasn’t going to play sitting duck just to see what it was made out of. Once she was sure it was dead, and searched it for anything helpful, she fucked off.

But those thoughts are all cast aside when whoever or whatever starts fucking running. She’s not happy when what little dim light there was is snuffed out, or happy about being called sister in any fashion, that’s a whole can of worms- but she doesn’t bitch about it right now. She’s already positioned for a fight, just turning slightly to face the probable threat.

When she does talk, it’s in a quick, hushed, brief whisper to warn, “Buddy, I hope you can handle yourself, not looking to save anyone’s ass right now if I don’t have to.”

"Not a lotta people around here who can't." Handle themselves, that is. But he doesn't take his eyes off the stairs, he does squint into the dark, however, when what looks like his own face appears in the dull light.

"Oh what the hell!"

He can't make it out that well, and he can pull the gun plenty fast if he wanted to. But the thing lunges, and Drifter neatly grabs it and shoves it up against the wall, arm against its throat, that hand still holding his gun.

He raises his other hand, palm radiating sunny heat and light, and he scowls into what's obviously his own face. His own face, without any of the scarring and poorly designed eyes. The fuckin' things could be googly eyes, even. They're very much a special level of shitty quality.

"The hell kinda robot is this??"

Well, be it her overconfidence that she's worlds more capable than probably everyone else here, or just her judgmental assumptions that most people here are children, she would not agree with that statement. At least as far as the native citizens who live here or whatever, she's positive most have been thoroughly fucked up with this shit tonight.

But she doesn't really have time for any snide or snippy comments, their guest is finally showing up to the party. And as any good hosts, they need to give the new arrival their full attention.

It takes her a hot second to really make out the face, but she's not entirely surprised to see it's the same as his own. She's about to start throwing punches, but he easily grapples the thing up against a wall. He seems to have it under control, and in less than a split second she decides her best move is to hang back slightly and watch for any others wanting to sneak up on them or shit. She keeps her gaze on the two though, in case he can't keep that control and needs a hand.

"I fucking told you! The bitch who came at me earlier looked almost entirely like me!" Same badly done features like this one has, but otherwise it was wearing her goddamn face.

"Kill it before it realizes you're made of squishy meat and breakable bones instead of metal and wires like it is." She growls out, scrunching her nose up and glaring at the thing.

Sure, part of her considers if they could somehow squeeze any information out of it first. But her murderbot self didn't seem capable of speech, so, probably pointless to even try. Not that she tried to sit around and chitchat with it. Once it finished shambling towards her and attacked, she was more focused on putting it down in pieces than playing the 20 questions game.

"No! I need him to die!" It protests. It's not silent like hers. It can talk. It sounds eerily like him, even if the face is incomplete.

Drifter squints at it, and he was going to recommend interrogating it, but as if it took a cue from what South said and punches him in the side, accompanied by the crunch of a well-punished rib. Winded, and now angry, the Lightbearer snarls and puts his glowing hand over its face.

"Anything's 'squishy' if you make it hot enough," he growls, all teeth and raw voice, winded from the hit to his ribs. And his hand flares, the things face glows, then it's whole head, and the meat of it ignites. He steps away from it so it can hobble around and flail uselessly. It's glitching out. It remembers what it's supposed to do, but it's pretty well fried.

"Just need a moment," he says, shoving it away, where it's lost and struggling to touch the railing and the wall in search of them. Underneath his clothes bones are knitting back together. And bullets are valuable. He has to make the things himself. If it can be defeated by hand? He'd rather do it that way.

Okay-! South's eyes widen slightly when it actually fucking speaks, unsure if it's ability to talk or what it said that's catching her the most off guard. Not that it matters either way, it's doing what she warned it would do and, well, that's a good solid situation to deal with. But it's in no way influenced by her words, it's not her fault- she only said the warning because the thing already had it planned! Zero her doing here.

"See!" She can't help letting out as she starts to jump in, but stops herself just short.

He seems to be handling it all well enough on his own for the moment despite the hit, so she takes a step back again and keeps an ear out for any more surprises.

She has about a million and two questions, watching the thing flounder around with a scrunched up expression. She of course can't see his body being repaired, figuring he's probably going to need his jacked up ribs addressed sooner than later but not while the thing is still standing.

"We should shove the bastard over the rail before it attracts more of them to us." If that's how it even works with these things or not, she doesn't have a clue, really.

It sounds solid enough to her, though. Get one noisy enemy bumbling around your location, it can easily become a beacon for more. Fuck knows what the other one will be able to do. Her's didn't do much verbally other than a metal-on-metal sort of growl, this one not only said words but made a sentence. Should probably be a pretty alarming sentence at that, but it doesn't look like it's need for him to die would be met, anyways. Still, for all she knows, the next of them that comes along could easily be even more capable and have a real chance of achieving it's goal. She'd rather not find out.

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Drifter | Destiny

this is a material world

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Blackout (I'm late to the party so def feel free to ignore/not reply if you don't wanna)

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CW: Describing some painful cyborg burning and violence

Re: CW: Describing some painful cyborg burning and violence