dualislogs | kitty at my foot and i wanna touch it.

kitty at my foot and i wanna touch it.

WHO: Open to all residents
WHAT: Your regularly scheduled NAPs event for the month
WHERE: The RoCocoa Cat Cafe
WHEN: Aug. 10-14
WARNINGS: Please use these if applicable!

Look at all of these bright, shining new faces! There’s even a few less bright, less shining faces, but hey, this city welcomes all types. Chances are, if you’ve just arrived, you're seeing some pretty crazy things, unless you're used to an eye-blinding amount of neon, robots, weird-ass technology, magic, and an omnipresent police force...and hey, if you are, congrats, you're gonna settle in juuuuust fine. But for the rest of you, the Head knows this has gotta be pretty overwhelming, right?

Well, since your quaint individual processing units are probably having a hard time, why not link up with another one? By which the Head means...

Hello, new citizens of Dualis,
and welcome to your monthly Network Adjacency Protocol~!

NAPs are a monthly community networking event similar to the Earth concept of speed dating! Two citizens (new arrivals and old hands alike) are placed at a table together with a handy cue card of queries to help break the proverbial ice. Ask queries and receive results, or ignore the card and yeet yourself straight into a brand new friendship! But don't be too shy, you've only got ten minutes together, and if you just sit in silence for the whole ten, the Network Admins are likely to come supervise and try to repair the uplink through a mild shock to the ol' central nervous system. You might find yourself saying all sorts of unintended facts about yourself if that happens...probably better to just make friends, right? Who doesn’t like friends?!

This month’s event is held at the brand new RoCocoa Cat Cafe, a sparkly new establishment that caters to children and the young at heart with iced and hot cocoa drinks of all kinds, delicious pastries, age-appropriate live music, and of course many friendly kitties who love to lounge in laps. The cats are of all shapes, sizes, and colors, including some who may look a little different from what you expect, or may look like an ordinary cat but are actually anything but ordinary underneath that adorable fur coat. All cats in the cafe are adoptable, too, if you meet a new furry friend and just can’t bear to go home without them!

So pull up a chair, get to know your new neighbors, and enjoy a sugary treat or two with the resident furbabies. You might just meet your new two- or four-legged best friend!

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That's what Connor thought he was going to do back in Detroit - learn to be something else. Or at the very least find something to define him that wasn't hunting deviants. But he's not there anymore.

But actually...

"Yeah, I guess this could be a fresh start. Nobody has to know what I was..." he says thoughtfully. It's definitely something to consider - does he like being a detective or is it just because he didn't know any different?

"What about you?" he asks, still petting the cat, but looking a bit more relaxed about it now. "Do you still fight or are you trying something else?"

How good is Connor at picking out dark looks from people's faces. Because there's a serious dark look on Nida's face.

"I'm a mechanic now."

He's programmed to read the room in hostage situations, interrogations, all kinds of police work - he's decent enough at faces to know Nida's not at all happy about the answer he's giving, and yet despite that training will more than happily be blunt enough to ask why.

"You don't like being a mechanic?"

Oh, he's fine with the answer he's giving. Nida adores his current work. It's the thought of combat that bothers him. Even though he has been reacquiring weaponry. Apparently he can't live with the resolve to be peaceful.

"I adore cars," Nida counters, voice a bit more relaxed. "Last place I was didn't have anything with an engine. Not that we could get at. I'm happy to be working with them again."

So what was with that look, he wonders. Maybe it's the fighting he didn't like. After all, Connor was made to be a detective, it's inside his very programming. Humans just don't work like that.

But now there's another question to add to a growing list.

"Where were you that didn't have engines? That you could get at."

Edited 2019-08-14 19:20 (UTC)

"It was called the Village, or the Iteration. Another seeming Nexus world like this. Only the things watching us were a bit less overt. I'm told it was very 'Edwardian' era technology for Earth, not that I know when that period was. We were lucky to have running cold water. And once in a while some houses and other structures had electricity."

And everyone had to work together to survive.

"Edwardian - about a hundred and forty years ago," Connor murmurs, almost more as a note to himself than to actually tell Nida anything, since he's starting to suspect Nida might not be from the same world at all - and thoughts like that still make him want to run a diagnostic every couple of minutes, but he has a two-tailed eyeless cat in his lap and there are aliens.

"So this isn't even the only place of its kind." How many more are there out there, kidnapping people not just from their homes and all the people they've ever known, but from the very worlds they came from?

"It's all pretty hard to take in - none of this should be possible," he says, LED skipping yellow and clearly thinking hard. "But it is, otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here."

So that's the assumption he has to start with - this is all real. Connor isn't programmed with any kind of scientific knowhow, not even enough to know what specific field he would need to know to try to work out what exactly's going on here. He can't spend too much time trying to work that out.

"What about originally - where are you from?"

"This isn't actually the weirdest thing I've been through. Movement through space seems infinitely possible," Nida shrugs. "It's the time aspect that gets things funny. But my world, Hyne as me and my friends call it, had a Sorceress who could manipulate time itself. So this?"

He gestures around them.

"This seems more reasonable."

Not the fact that when he went home he didn't remember any of it. But still, this is all rather illogical.

"Hyne..." he repeats it, leaning back fully in the chair and watching Nida carefully, distractedly petting the cat behind the ears. It starts to make an odd sort of rumbling noise like a small machine, and that make him glance down briefly - but it doesn't move so...he keeps doing it.

"Do you know anything about magic? How it works, anything?" He's guessing if Hyne has real sorceresses in it, that must mean magic, right?... His brain is still telling him this is nonsense, but he's determined to ignore it. That's where he is now, ignoring all logic.

But then, before Nida can say anything, he shakes his head, almost smiling.

"Sorry. I don't mean to sound like I'm interrogating you - this is just really new to me."

"I'm not the most experienced in the true magic of my world, but I was trained in paramagic, which is somewhat different. Normal humans don't have magic where I'm from. Monsters do, and Sorceresses. We have to form bonds with spiritual beings we call Guardian Forces, which allow us to use their power of magic for ourselves."

And eat memories, but that's its own mess.

"Please, this is one of the better things I can be interrogated about. I actually have answers to it."

Edited 2019-08-16 17:10 (UTC)

"It's the best thing I've ever interrogated anybody about."

Which is totally true - he's only given one and it was technically a success, but looking back on it as a deviant still makes him squirm a little on the inside. Especially with what happened afterwards to the android he was interrogating.

"You were trained in it?" He raises his eyebrows, but then, "I don't know why I'm surprised to hear that. Maybe it just sounds so fantastical I didn't think it could be something you'd just be taught like anything else."

"I was trained at a... military academy," Nida muses briefly. Then he shakes his head. He doesn't want to get into that.

"Magic is a rare thing back on my world, including paramagic users. We do have to be trained, though. Learning to channel those sorts of forces can be pretty hard. And even then, you're not guaranteed to be good at magic. I'm not the best at it, except wind and water spells. And even those I don't manage with extreme power.

Machine Connor, the one that didn't smash through his programming mere days ago, would have honed in on that clear reluctance and poked at it - because he's curious. Deviant Connor notices, is curious, and has enough social graces to just make a mental note and move on with the conversation.

He's not working, he doesn't need to know everything.

"I guess it's the same as with androids in some ways," he says, trying to put this in terms he understands more easily. Some humans just have magic programmed into them. "We're programmed to do specific things - I could try to learn to...I don't know, give lectures or fix other androids, but I'll never be as good at it as somebody who's programmed to do it."

Probably any human could learn to do those things if they were taught well enough and worked hard enough. Androids aren't quite the same in that way. He doesn't think so.

Are they?

He's frowning. Maybe he's just overthinking the whole thing.

"Who says?" Nida asks, looking at the man very carefully. The android. "Who says you have to only be what they made you? Who says you can't be something more because you choose it?"

Because that's what Nida used to think. That he could only be the blade in the dark, only the spy and the killer. And here he's trying something else. It's harder to learn, it's harder to keep with, but he's trying. Trying with everything he can until he makes it better.

"It's about choice, because that's what we make. Choices keep moving forward. Keep going. Learn something new. It will be hard for you, like it's hard for the rest of us."

He's frowning, but it's not because he disagrees.

"This is actually the first time I've ever thought about this," he says quietly. "I..."

Before he turned deviant, he had no doubts in his mind about what he would spend his entire existence doing. He would hunt deviant androids, complete his investigation, and probably be deactivated, studied and the information he gathered used to improve the RK900, his successor.

"I didn't have the choice until a couple of days ago. I was supposed to be deactivated," he goes on. "It never occurred to me I'd ever have to think about doing anything else.

"I don't even know what I'd choose."

He's only been a deviant a couple days, he doesn't need to have his whole life planned out immediately. But as his LED flickers between blue and yellow, it's definitely feeling like he has to.

"Here's the secret. Neither do we."

And that's something no one tells you in the manual for living. That no one knows what they're doing. Some never figure it out. Some do and they're lucky. That's sort of what humanity is about these days. Trying to find purpose for yourself. IT can be long. it can be frustrating. But it can also be rewarding.

"Sounds like the perfect time to do research and take up some hobbies to me."

Well, if he expected to find an exact, concrete answer to the meaning of life today, he's going to be sorely disappointed.

"Hobbies," he says like he's never heard the word before in his life. "I guess... Yeah, I guess I should find something else to do."

This is clearly a new and unexpected development in Connor's life.

"What do you do for fun then, Nida?" he smiles, just the ghost of a grin. "Help me get started."

Oh come on, android, you can't do that. Nida grins and shakes his head.

"Free climbing. This city is wonderful for it and parkour, especially with how things move and change."

Hey, he can try. Besides, asking people what they do absolutely counts as conducting research.

"I don't actually know what those are," he says, then quickly clarifies. "Obviously I know what climbing is, but..."

Help him out here, Nida.

Really? A cop-andriod doesn't know? Nida smiles and shakes his head. "Alright then. So, free-climbing is like climbing, but with no safety gear. I have done it mountains, but I love it in cities. Parkour is an art of moving where you minimize loss of momentum, and you also do pretty intense things. Jumping between building rooftops, climbing things, flipping over other stuff. I'm sure somewhere on the network there are videos."

And he'd offer to show off some but this is neither the time nor the place.

"Oh," and Connor brightens in recognition. "Then I've done parkour. I chased a suspect over rooftops once - part of it was an urban greenhouse so I had to go over and around a lot of things. I honestly didn't know it had a name."

He omits the part where he jumped on a moving train and then lost the suspect, but still.

"How high have you gone free-climbing?" Genuine interest - as an android, Connor wouldn't be that worried about climbing with no safety equipment: falling probably wouldn't kill him, exposure and exhaustion aren't an issue, his strength wouldn't fail him. Humans have none of those advantages - but here's Nida, telling him he does it anyway. And that's pretty amazing.

Definitely has a name. And yeah, jumping onto a train would absolutely count. But Nida just smiles to hear the guy has tried it. Not intentionally.

"There are places in town where you can learn to do it, or be better at it if you already can."

Still, the other question has him now thinking. Thing is, he hasn't bothered to calculate before. At least, not the mountain. Buildings? Yeah, he can tell by stories. But otherwise? No, nothing specifically.

"I couldn't tell you what altitudes I hit back home when I did the mountain climbing. Tallest building I've climbed the exterior of? six story. The dorm here."

"The dorm?" he asks, eyebrows raised. "I never even thought of going up that."

...When he was testing out his visualisation abilities, he mentally simulated jumping out of his 5th storey window. So he's thought of doing down, sure.

"Maybe I could try that for... For fun." He still looks a little like the concept of 'fun' is new to him. It is, but in a kind of way where he's fully ready to jump into it. "Could you show me a couple of these places sometime, you think?"

Is that crossing a boundary of some kind? He's unsure, and he looks it. Being social without needing something from somebody is new to him as well. This isn't integrating with a team or wheedling information or goodwill out of somebody, it's just...company. He might not be sure of himself, but he's finding he likes it.

"Up tends to be easier than down. Less injuries," Nida smiles. At least, by his experience. That might not be fully accurate. But he grins at the man's consideration of it. He can spread some love of this around. Altair and Malik would be happy with him for this.

"Actually, there's a place around town that will teach you the basics. I can take you there. And maybe a place with a fake rock-wall for climbing. Get you some experience in evaluating surfaces before we put you at risk."

It would be a lot of fun. In fact, he wants to see how fast this new person picks things up. In a strange way, Connor already reminds him a little of himself when he arrived at the Village. How he needed to learn to relax and be himself. And learn who himself was.

"I've heard that before," he says, with a grin and the kind of voice that says he doesn't buy into such rumours. Connor's done very little actual climbing or falling in his time anyway. And that just cements his wanting to - it's new, he's never done it, what's stopping him?

"I'd really like that." And Connor's got absolutely no worries about sounding uncool or too eager or whatever a younger human might worry about, because he just sounds genuinely interested in trying out something new, with someone who doesn't give a damn or what he is. And that might be even more appealing than the new hobby.

Then the very obvious occurs to him.

"Uh, back home my serial number doubled up as my phone number," he says, now rummaging for the phone in his pocket.

Yet another reminder that humans had domain over every part of him, including getting into his brain to commandeer his attention whenever they wanted.

"Do we just swap phone numbers?"

Look, he's never had a phone before. Or friends.

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skyward_eyes - 2019-09-08 17:19 (UTC) - Expand

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notalive - 2019-09-10 19:28 (UTC) - Expand

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