victory_road | ⊕ 001 & action option

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⊕ 001 & action option

[ he's not into showing his face off. once he verifies there's a public network and an audio option, he begins to opt for that. but then he looks at all the videos of people and their pokemon, and decides o a different option.

the video opens on the sandy beaches of cherrygrove. his rockruff, bandit, is in the surf, chasing what looks like a stick. he brings it back to jack, who pets his head and then throws it again. his location will also ping as cherrygrove. ]

The name's Jack.

[ his voice is distinctly older, and very rough. it sounds like he may have damaged his throat at some point in his life. his hand, when he throws the stick or pets bandit, is gloved. ]

I've been looking around this place and it looks like the consensus is that people can't go home on their own. I'm not here to ask how to get home, since it seems like that's been covered pretty well.

I wanna talk to those of you that have gone home, or know people that did. And... for those that don't, how you're dealing with not being able to.

[ he ends the video on that note, throwing the stick again for bandit. ]

( cherrygrove )

[ for those actually in his vicinity, they can likely hear jack make the post. other than that, he's spending some time on the beach, playing with bandit and getting his energy out. he's just as open to a battle if you two have similarly leveled pokemon.

or maybe bandit, with all his energy, comes running up to your pokemon and headbutts them. at which point jack follows. ]

Bandit. Come back here.

[ the wagging of his tail doesn't amuse jack. ]

Sorry about him.

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[ jack... actually looks up from his hands and gives ford a bit of a side eye for that. then he manages a laugh, but stops pretty quickly. everything's too heavy - don't need to fall off. ]

My normal baseline is a whole bottle, and I wouldn't even be here. If I knew I was back to where I was before...

[ he would have paced himself.

also, ya farm boy racist. ]

Side effect of the changes. Alcohol's a poison, and all that.

Anything can be a poison in sufficient quantities.

[Good, great, what a good thing to say. He's saved having to answer for it when Jack's water arrives. The food's probably going to be a bit longer, but in the meantime the water should help.]

So your 'changes' -- they enabled you to repel toxic substances?

[Seems useful. Ford could have probably made use of that all those times he had to figure out if something on an alien planet was deadly or edible by just putting it in his mouth.]

[ jack obligingly takes a deep drink of the water, at least. he's not about this life either, sorry ford.

at least, ford asking questions jack can answer helps keep him focused. ]

One of many things they do - did. Superior strength, superior healing, survivability. I could be shot in the heart and get up minutes later, and be healed in an hour. You could drop me from the desert into Antarctica and I would be able to adjust, no problem.

Really?

[Neat! Any possible awkwardness is completely forgotten in the wake of how cool that is. Ford is already reaching into one of the many, many pockets in his coat for one of his several notebooks and a pen. Gotta note this down.]

Do you know roughly what your upper and lower temperature limits were? Were you able to go longer without food or water? Could you regrow limbs, or did your self-healing only extend to repairing damaged structures and not to producing new ones?

[AAAAAAAAAAA]

[ jack shakes his head a little bit, grimacing. ]

Sorry - I was the subject, not the scientist. I know I could last longer in freezing than a human could, and basically never got heatstroke.

We could, but we generally had a higher caloric intake. I never lost a limb, but I survived a building being blown up and dropped on me - so, maybe.

Fascinating.

That you bear scars indicates the healing factor wasn't perfect -- unless you were given those prior to the beginning of the experiment?

[Either option is interesting. Perfect healing means a body that barely changes. Would that cut into aging? Surely not, unless Jack is even older than he looks or began the treatment very late in life. Healing that leaves scars implies an imperfect method, or perhaps a lack of concern for efficacy beyond what would be necessary for survival. But some scars can restrict mobility; would those be wiped away?

Why can't this place just leave all the cool stuff intact so he can study it properly. It's such a pain.]

Most of them are after it. The threshold seems to be "should have killed me" for leaving one.

[ again, see: building should have rightly killed him.

either way, for the moment the aipom spares him by bringing the ordered edamame, at the very least. jack gives it a thanks, pulling it towards himself and grabbing a few to stuff into his mouth.

ugh. ]

Oh, you should--

[Wince.]

You'll want to take them out of the pod first.

That does make sense, though. With so much energy going toward keeping you alive there must be very little left over to go toward preventing a scar.

[Even with boosted healing capabilities, there must be only so much to go around. It needs to be rationed properly.]

... Right.

[ well, a couple of these are crushed. don't look as jack as he SPITS THEM BACK OUT IN HIS HAND and begins pulling them open. drunk idiot.

jack makes a grunt of agreement. ]

There were a hundred of us that went through that program. By the end of it we were less than ten.

Probably checked the limb part on the other guys.

Yeesh.

[Is that about the mangled beans or the implication? Maybe a little of both.]

Congratulations on being one of the lucky ones.

[He lowers his pen, flipping it idly back and forth across his fingers. This raises a lot of other questions and he can't decide which is the most important.]

... What exactly were they preparing you to fight?

[ well, at least he has a napkin to sort them out onto. small mercies. jack shrugs one shoulder on being complimented.

some days, it definitely didn't feel like one, that was for sure. the question on what they were fighting, goes unanswered as he picks through the edamame pods for a moment. ]

Omnics. A company had the idea of creating robots that would help humans. They went defunct and shut down, but the Omniums they produced - factories that self ran, that could learn and improve - didn't, and kept going for decades. The Omnium software became what it called a god program, and they sent Omnics to attack us.

Ah.

[He nods like this is completely reasonable. And really it is -- if you're going to be fighting machines, you need to be as close to a machine yourself as you can get if you want to have a chance.]

Your traditional robot uprising. I take it that no one in your world ever read I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream?

[Like... self-aware robotics 101, right there. Never just leave it alone if it can learn and self-replicate unless you're super hype for a knife in the back.]

[ honestly, that's the truth. when the robot factories start sending out miniature transforming tanks with chainguns, you want to give your guys the best chance of surviving... or getting back up after getting riddled with bullets.

jack chuckles despite himself. ]

Probably not the guys in charge of this company. They never bothered to tell anyone they left them on, or we could have, you know, flicked the power switch off.

[ more than likely, they had turned off the power and the Omnium had already developed a backup. ]

Rookie mistake.

[Ford shakes his head and pops a piece of karaage in his mouth.]

It's like the people who keep sailing stubbornly into the Bermuda triangle. At some point you're asking the Magnathorax to eat you.

[Says the man who absolutely had plans to sail into the Bermuda triangle to try and put his hands all up on the Magnathorax.]

Oh, is that what's in there?

[ look there are definitely some bermuda issues in his world, too. to the point they just declared it a no fly zone with overwatch technology.

jack takes another deep sip of his water and pulls open more edamame, popping it into his mouth. ]

So, yeah - spits out tanks, things that shoot lasers, sniper models. We were the only chance they had to fight back and even that wasn't perfect. Ended up taking a team of different people from over the world - most of 'em weren't in the same program I had been.

Edited (i didn't like that angle) 2019-02-05 02:25 (UTC)

Among other things.

[It's one of the places he's most interested to study, though he got precious little chance before arriving here. It used to be one of his childhood dreams to just sail into it and disappear. Wanting to sail into it and come back out again is some pretty tasty character growth.]

In my experience the bulk of the work in that kind of situation is almost always done by a ragtag group of whoever is brave enough.

[Possibly this is because he comes from a cartoon world where tropes do live and breathe to an extent, something that's only been reinforced here in a world where (just like most Pokémon games) all the difficult responsibility falls to the player characters.]

Was that where the young man with the dragons came in?

Genji?

[ a good sign he's a bit tipsy - he says the young man's name, before he shakes his head. ]

No - Genji was after that. We, uh, won, in case that was in question. It was me and an old friend of mine - several old friends. Most of it fell to us, in pushing them back.

Turned out that the Omniums weren't all connected. Some of them had decided on different protocol - life. They were making Omnics that wanted peace, but the God programs were hacking into them and turning them into weapons. So that became our goal. Shut down the factories, stop the war, hopefully stop any more death from happening.

I imagined you must have won, or you wouldn't be sitting here talking to me.

[At least not in such relatively-good condition. Alcohol content notwithstanding.

Ford kind of gets the impression that perhaps this whole story is something this man doesn't get to tell much (something that will be confirmed later when sober Jack asks him not to tell anybody else about it). It's a shame, because as stories go it's fascinating. Kinda lucky he was on the beach when he was to begin with, huh, or he'd probably be heading back to Violet right now instead of listening to this.]

And did you? Shut down all of them, I mean. [Ending the war obviously happened. Preventing more death probably didn't. It's the third thing that's a difficult variable to judge.]

[ jack sips his water again, slowly. ]

We shut down most of them. We treatised with the ones that were peaceful. And then we were left with that great issue after a global war - rebuilding.

We also had to keep the guys that looked like the ones that had been trying to kill us, from being destroyed before they could even establish themselves.

[ you want an unfortunate parallel to civil rights? jack scrubs his face with his hand. ]

[Oof, yeah. That's about as heavy-handed as it gets. All over again Ford feels incredibly lucky that Weirdmageddon was contained to just Gravity Falls, a town already very good at recovering after disaster. If Bill had actually managed to break down the barrier the cleanup would have been damn-near unthinkable.]

Remarkably compassionate of you. I have often found that most humans when faced with extra-human intelligent life tend to devalue and dehumanize it as fast as possible. Consider the fact that before the existence of alien life was even confirmed, the vast majority of human media concerning them was focused on how unlike us -- and therefore less moral, less civilized, and less deserving of life -- they were.

[ jack shakes his head a little. ]

I wasn't, at first. I was ready to shoot the lot of them into a smelter and be done with it.

[ he picks at some of the edamame shells with a frown on his face. ]

I met with some of their leaders. I realized that they were like kids, walking in light for the first time, but they understood what had happened. And I knew it was going to be an uphill battle for them.

[ so jack - got over it, compartmentalized it away, whatever he had to do. ]

The rest of the world didn't feel the same way. They weren't even considered alive by some places - less than.

Edited 2019-02-05 04:55 (UTC)

[The candid admission actually gets Ford to snort. Alright, fair. He can't say he wouldn't have felt the same way, at least a little bit.]

Of course. Inorganic or artificial life always has it hardest. Do you know I've had to have multiple arguments with other trainers about MIPS and whether or not it's 'really' alive?

... I should specify, MIPS is man-made. [Not that it wiggling around like a Bethesda dragon or stubbornly T-posing by turns wasn't a dead giveaway.] It's a similar but marginally less, uh, globally-destructive situation.

[ jack gives a little chuckle, popping some edamame into his mouth. ]

It's a little different. But I get what you mean. If they can think and feel, it doesn't matter if how they feel is different from us, or how they think isn't in a human brain.

I've seen omnics get hurt. They're not crying out in pain, but damage does something to them too. Everyone should get a chance to live without that. MIPS too.

[ and with that rousing speech, the other food dish arrives- and a cup of coffee, courtesy the human bartender. jack blinks. ]

What's this?

Edited 2019-02-06 05:28 (UTC)

[See, that's a wonderful sentiment and Ford would like to respond to it, except something way more pressing just happened.]

Is there no coffee in your universe?

[ Jack immediately turns and glares. ]

No, jackass, I mean the food.

[ he gestures at the plate of food. he hasn't eaten this particular thing before. ]

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MONCH MONCH

LOV THE CRONCH

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fuck html