dualislogs | sheets all on the floor just like an ocean ...

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sheets all on the floor just like an ocean ...

WHO: All y’all!
WHAT: Your regularly scheduled NAPs event for the month
WHERE: Fort Pillowtown
WHEN: Oct. 7-10
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 - maybe even a few folks without 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 a new, super-comfy all-ages establishment called Fort Pillowtown. As the name suggests, it’s a large indoor space filled wall to wall with permanent pillowforts. There are a variety of sizes, shapes, and colors, with each individual fort constructed of gauzy hanging sheets, strings of soft lights, warm blankets, plush toys, a mini television with on-screen menu for choosing movies to watch and video games to play, and yes, lots and lots of pillows. Snacks and drinks of all sorts are available for purchase, as are whimsical onesies and comfy slippers to wear. Board and card game sets are also available to borrow or buy. Sounds like a dream, right?

So pull up a pillow pile, get to know your new neighbors, and enjoy a well-earned and comfy chill-out session. And hey, if you end up napping at NAPs, rest assured that it’s absolutely allowed.

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"One day when we're near a kitchen during the holidays you'll find out this is exactly how the apocalypse would go."

He settles his hand on the other half of the controller. "This seems like it'd be easier with two controllers. Do they have another one over here?"

One arm around Connor's midsection, one on half the controller and resisting that urge to move it like that'd make the little Playskool style people move faster, it is a little awkward. But maybe this game is supposed to be awkward. (Okay, so this onesie does make him pretty comfortable to hug, he has to relent and admit that.)

Alright. Time to chop some lettuce.

"What do we make at the holidays?" Connor asks distractedly as he reluctantly disentangles himself from Hank just long enough to grab another, larger controller from under a pillow and switch it on. "It should be fine as long as we don't celebrate it with any meatball monsters."

But they never know who's going to turn up in the city.

Settling back into Hank, Connor indicates the screen.

"Orders are on the top left. I hand you food, you chop. Then I…throw it in his mouth?"

Just like in a real restaurant.

"So much shit. Turkey. Cranberry sauce. Mashed potatoes. Fuck I'm gonna make myself hungry. Restart the level so I can switch this."

And he moves the controller to hold, settled against Connor's stomach as he tries to coordinat his fingers better.

"So okay. I chop the lettuce with this button. And- ope, dropped it in the floor. Okay. Pick that shit up, carry it over to you. And then I tomato?"

He's pondering out loud as he's trying to get the hang of it. He makes his little person burst into speed a couple of times before putting something down properly.

He restarts the level. Now Hank's got one character, and Connor's got two, one with each hand. He leans his head back on Hank's shoulder, even though he can't feel anything except a solid weight through the onesie.

"We can figure something out if you want." How hard can it be? (Answer: very) "Thanksgiving, right - end of November?"

He wasn't really programmed with an extensive knowledge of holidays.

"Does the Ever Peckish care if we drop his food on the floor? Chop this tomato. It looks like the only dishes are lettuce by itself and lettuce and tomato together, so we always need lettuce."

Connor's got his little man chopping lettuce and his raccoon busily rushing back and forward with vegetables.

"Pick it up," he mutters, irrationally cross all of a sudden as the raccoon fumbles a tomato. Definitely the raccoon, not the person controlling the raccoon.

"Apparently not," Hank mutters, snagging tomatoes and doing his very best to get them through it. The 'Ever Peckish'. doesn't seem easily satisfied. It's unsurprising that Hank is still a little more off than Connor with both hands, even though Hank is using a whole controller and here's Connor managing two tiny people.

He has a little orange cat, and the little orange cat is finally not bullrushing the counter every time he wants to put down a tomato.

"I might be on track for getting a promotion." He informs him casually. "I guess you'll have to find all the double parked cars without me for a little while." He nudges his cheek through the hood.

It raises a lot of questions, too. When will they go home? Will he have to leave Connor alone for a month or can he stay with him? At least, at the very least, he'll finally have a proper goodbye from the job he loved, even if it's in a wierd 1980s futuredream.

"Good." Because that's definitely what's happening - a lot of this food is going to make contact with the floor before they're done here.

"Concentrate on the lettuce," he murmurs, because obviously impending Armageddon is more important than Hank's job. Then he smiles. "Congratulations - I'll try and keep traffic running without you. Do you know what you'll be doing?"

Connor doesn't expect any kind of promotion for a long time. He's got all the programming knowledge and skills of an experienced detective, but none of the actual experience: the job he's doing is completely new to him, as will anything he's promoted to after this be. Real police officers and other androids handled all of this - Connor was never intended for normal, everyday police work.

His little people are busily chopping and running food around between them, although one of them keeps bumping into Hank's cat and Connor keeps grumbling about it wordlessly.

"Alright. Lettuce. I'll do lettuce." His little cat person toddles over without the bursts of speed and starts its lettuce duty.

"Missing persons." He clarified. Then leaned in. "I still think it'll give us some answers," he says against the hoodie of Connor's onesie, near his ear. And then becomes overwhelmingly charmed with this doofusy bullshit and leaves a little kiss through the fabric.

Luckily, they're in a pillowfort and no one will see this gross display.

His cat gets bumped again and he says a soft 'fuck', before picking up the dropped lettuce again and making another go of it.

He nods slowly, then grins as he feels Hank kiss the side of his head through the fabric. He leans his head in against Hank's and keeps it there while busily churning out salad.

"It doesn't hurt to try," he says, still concentrating. "And even if it doesn't turn up what we want to know..." He twitches a shoulder against Hank. "You're still doing good work."

Before either of them can do anything else, and when Connor is two seconds from throwing another salad into the gaping maw of doom, everything stops and he's momentarily distracted with time portals and the virtues of cooperation.

"I'm a few months away from any kind of promotion, but I should think about what I want to do here," he says, still watching the screen. "Why didn't he use the time portal in the first place... Anyway, when we go back home, I uh...was thinking about hostage negotiation. For real, not just lying to deviants about CyberLife killing them."

He steers them towards the next level.

"I haven't seen a single hostage case since we got here, though."

So he should probably concentrate on something the city actually needs. He doesn't want to follow Hank for the sake of following Hank - besides, Connor going elsewhere in the department gives them a better chance of picking things up.

"Soup." He's still staring at the screen, there is some context to this single-word statement.

"So I need... three? Onions. Alright, onions." Hank runs his little cat over for onions. This time, all of once, he uses the sprint correctly. Slowly but surely he's trying it.

"It's a surveillance state so it's difficult to take hostages. Also it's one single city. There's nowhere to go- at least, nowhere that I know of to go."

Something that he should find out. That they both should find out. Surely there's something outside of the city's boundaries.

"Most cases require some sort of negotiation or interrogation. Pretty sure your skills could be put to use there."

And then apologetically, sadly, he adds- "It wasn't your fault, you know. You couldn't do anything else back then." Because he remembers how keenly Connor had held onto that when the first spoke at lunch, a real conversation between the two of them.

“Pass me the onions, I’ll chop them and cook them.” Connor’s man and raccoon burst into action, although he doesn’t immediately anticipate people walking in the road and immediately dashes into one of them. “What? Why is there a road going through the kitchen?”

He sounds genuinely put out about this.

“Right,” he says, bringing himself back to the actual conversation at hand. “I think I need to be promoted to detective before they let me examine crime scenes or interrogate suspects.”

Or he wouldn’t object to that either. Interrogation probably wouldn’t give him such a sick, empty sort of feeling if there was a real criminal on the other side of the table, not a scared deviant.

“I just want to…” He shrugs...and accidentally puts a tomato in an otherwise onion soup. “Shit. There’s a trash can over there, gimme a minute. Chop some more onions.”

He’s tensing a little against Hank here.

“I could have done things differently,” he says quietly. “I already knew I could grab him and drag him off the edge without killing the little girl. I chose to lie to him.”

He’s largely abandoned the man he’s controlling in his left hand while he talks - the racoon is still busily working away, though.

“That’s what I’m going to make up for.”

Hank starts using the little bursts of speed more accurately. Picks up onion. Runs with it. Puts it on counter. Picks it up, runs, counter. He's slowly learning, even if not miraculously good. Though this level, to get higher than a one star, might still require a restart.

He plays away, where he would be swearing tempered by the solid but also incredibly cuddly form leaning against him.

"You should make up for it," he assures him, and again kisses him through the onesie. "But remember, that particular guy took the one innocent person in that family hostage. He tried to retaliate by threatening what was most precious to him. Yeah, what they wanted to do was awful, but still.

"I like knowing that even then you treated your life with more fucking value than I have for mine. It might have not been a life yet, but it was on its way. So it was lie to the guy, be honest and let the girl die, or pitch yourself uselessly off a fucking roof."

Because it's true. He would have hated knowing that Connor would just throw his life away to complete a mission. That living meant nothing to him, that he was an endless parade of replacements.

He nods, leaning into the affection, but doesn't tell Hank the other side of his self-preservation instincts. It's true: he didn't want to have to sacrifice himself, so he made it his very last resort. But at the same time, he knew - still knows - just how much money one single RK800 cost to make. Destroying them when it wasn't necessary was a loss for CyberLife.

"He was the first android I ever saw be disgusted by humans," he says at the screen, directing his raccoon to chop every onion it can reach and the guy to put the chopped vegetables in soup. "I stopped to tourniquet an injured officer and he asked why it mattered if he died, because he was just a human."

He grimaces.

"Even then, I didn't like that."

...He glances up to the top left of the screen. "We don't need any more onions, we have too many. Tomatoes and mushrooms.

"...Where are the plates?"

Edited 2019-10-20 21:10 (UTC)

"Why are the plates on the opposite sides of the- Why are the rats fuckin' taking the ingredients! Fuck you rat, I'm putting the pot by me."

His little cat wanders off to grab a pot to put by his cutting board. "Okay I think I need to chop and you run and get stuff 'cause the rats are bein' a pain."

That's hard to hear, though, his mind returning to the topic at hand. "I sorta knew that guy. In that regular face at work sort. He was always there on Crisis scenes. Our paths started crossin' at the worst times, when said crisis turned murder. You stopped me from havin' to look at his."

Or that girl's. And if there's anything Hank finds hard to take, it's children's bodies. Always hard to find that sense of detachment when faced with a young life being taken. A necessary mental space to conduct the investigation (he can, usually, but it floods back on him later twice as hard).

"You did really good- Fuck that fucking rat."

These kitchens do not have very good organisational or hygiene standards, to be perfectly honest.

“If you put the pot next to you it’s all going to take longer to cook,” he mutters, almost a grumble, but there’s not very much he can do about it but send over one of his little avatars to knock rats around while the other furiously chops tomatoes.

“Just hit them. This button.” He drops one of his controllers so it’s hanging off his wrist on its little strap just long enough to tap one of the buttons on Hank’s controller before flicking his own back up into his hand.

“I’m glad I did what I did. I didn’t know why I was doing it at the time, but it seemed important enough to make time for.” Even looking back, he can’t quite explain it. The official reason was to make the humans sympathetic, to make Connor sympathetic...but it didn’t work that way, and he did it anyway.

“This layout is…” He’s chopping and smacking rats, he can’t think of a decent word. “...stupid.”

Perfect.

He looks at his controller. But, unfortunately, Hank is not the most coordinated of souls, and the rat is very very fast for a tubby kitty such as him. So his efforts are quickly squashed. Connor can nimbly handle two little strange people at once. Hank can barely manage one.

"It works if you switch it out the full pot for the empty pot. Remember, I've not played games since I was ten. Take it easy on me."

He is a little bit of a doofus, doing his best. He's even sticking the tip of his tongue out between those notched teeth and wrinkling his nose in concentration sometimes.

"I don't think they're meant to be smart, though." They're meant to be smart. And Hank's fingers are just not smart at this particular task. He's not rage-quitting, though. He's sticking with it.

"Remember, I've never played video games before at all," he retorts, though he softens it by flashing Hank a brief grin before going back to beating rats - or trying to - and chopping a lot of vegetables.

"I know, they're meant to challenge our... What was it, our cooperative skills? What was that talking onion saying again?" Connor, having no respect for royal titles.

"What was that?" That being a buzzer-like sound that even Connor recognises as 'you done fucked up'. They've taken too long on a soup, probably because two rats are making off with a chopped onion and a full tomato between them, Connor's cat is futilely chasing the onion and his little bearded man is concentrating on chopping another tomato for a soup that's about to boil over.

"Your face is a video game," Hank says like that's an argument for Connor saying that he's never played video games. But that brief grin gets a little kiss, which is a second of advantage for the fake rats, but whatever, the fake rats are there and he'd rather deal with that sweet smile than those little bastards.

"Our cooperative skills are fine, my controller skills are just shit."

He huffs out an unhappy breath and lets his hands settle in Connor's lap, just watching the screen.

"Alright. New tomato. New mushroom. Got those. Chop chop chop. Now into the fucking pot."

Hank's thumbs stop moving, but his little man continues to move. It runs over, picks up a tomato, runs back. His performance, while not perfect, seems to improve. Except that his hands are barely twitching with his thoughts.

Connor makes a face that can best be described as totally flummoxed at that. It's one of those moments where he knows the comment isn't literal because obviously it isn't literal, but what it does mean, and how to respond to it? Not a clue. Hank helps him a moment later by kissing him, and even though that brings his attention totally away from the rats stealing his onions (a thing he has never before had to worry about), he lets it linger, pleased.

...And then he turns back to find he's let the soup catch fire.

"No more distractions," he says at the screen, leaning back into Hank and settling himself in for the long haul. "What's that flashing thing?...Right, the fire extinguisher. Keep working on your side, I'll...fix this, then try to catch up with the onions."

He has the kind of tone of voice he might use directing a crime scene. Cordon off the area! Make sure the rubberneckers can't see the body, get some tarp up over here! Plate this soup before we lose the order! Where are CSI?

"Connor... Connor." Hank reaches to his controller and presses pause.

"This isn't real life. We can restart the level." Gently. "And now you know the exact time before things burn or what it takes to catch the rats, right? Let's take it from the top. It's not often you get to have clean do-overs and learn from your mistakes."

If fake life can be less complicated, he wants to take advantage of it.

Connor blinks and twists his head to stare at Hank.

"It's..." He lets out a long breath and nods slowly. "You're telling me not to take this so seriously."

Which is probably good advice - the annoyance at not being perfect at this immediately hangs inside him like it's weighted down.

"OK," he concedes, turning back and leaning his head on Hank's. "I'll try."

And he disconnects one of his controllers, leaving him with just his little raccoon.

"Sitting here in a fuckin' onesie commanding gradeschool characters like it's the Waterloo. Fuckin' yeah, you can't take it seriously."

Hank's actively chuckling by his ear though, because it's so fucking ridiculous. In fact he ends up snorting and burying his face against Connor's neck to suppress the sound. It's a miracle he can go after the tomatoes while he's doing that.

At that, Connor finally cracks a grin, albeit sort of unwillingly, and deliberately shifts his shoulder under Hank as if poking at his face with it.

"Well, Lieutenant, one of us has to keep the situation under control," he says, though this time he's clearly trying not to grin. "We've got a tomato and an onion. You got the tomatoes?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

sheets all on the floor just like an ocean ...

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