silph_co | He's Going The Distance (Open)

He's Going The Distance (Open)

Who: Dirk Strider, OTA
Where: Goldenrod Rocket Labs
When: Early March!
Summary: If you want to steal some Lapras, you must first.... build a giant robot?
Rating: PG-13 for cursing and Dirk-like behaviour

Dirk's presence in the Rocket labs is pretty much continuous lately. Two full time jobs and a fervent desire to be anywhere but in a shared dorm randomly generated Rocket personnel made his whereabouts something of a guarantee anyway, but with the successful integration of his (un)patented BroPro and PokeGear, he's gotten started working on something specific.

Something... big. Something mechanical, maybe even automechanical. Something with huge cameras for eyes and a head bigger than him.

This is... fine. It's got to be fine because he must have approval for it; he certainly couldn't hide it even if he wanted to.

Most everything is joined to some kind of concave sheet metal layer, and as days and weeks pass, his upper half sometimes disappears entirely into this as he progresses to affixing wires, hard soldering the panels, and occasionally just ripping everything apart and throwing it in big noisy heaps of twisted aluminium and wrenched steel.

It looks like... a turtle shell?

...

(Sometimes, you can even find him sleeping in there...)

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God, it's so cool.

The fact that Dirk and Jack are building a goddamn giant robot together... that's so cool. How is this his life? How is this any of their lives? At some point in the relatively near future, they're going to have a giant robot.

(Getting a chance to look at it again probably is a lot of why Steven volunteered to be the guy to bring Dirk food from the mess, before he accidentally sent himself to a pokecenter via starvation.)

Yes, they will have a giant robot.... Dirk hopes. He's really pressing right up against the technological limitations of this place, but if you're not attempting any kind of AI bullshit, then the vast majority of robotics is just mechanical engineering with a few more buttons to push at the end of it.

It takes a singleminded kind of person to see a project like this through to completion by oneself, from concept to plans to test type to alpha to finished product, but he doesn't actually need to do this all by himself, and in fact is.... well, he's not, which is. Surprisingly okay. It's been a few years since.... since he had a collaborator. It's not a real collaboration, at least not in his opinion, because he maintains absolute oversight of everything and he makes the final decisions, because he knows all too well what happens when he doesn't.

He's by himself right now, though, and true to singularly focused form, way more invested in fixing whatever is fucking up his welding torch right now than whenever he last ate. He's sitting in a tangle of wires and metal bars at the robot's unfinished 'base' like a bizarre bird in an unwelcoming nest.

But then he smells food, and--

"Oh, holy shit."

The possibility that he is slavering over someone else's food comes a second slower than his awareness of and desire for said food, and he continues in what he hopes is a smooth and casually undetectable manner.

"What are you even doing here?"

"Bringing you food," Steven says with a shrug, thrusting the plate (which seems to contain a hamburger, gravy, and rice) over in Dirk's direction. "The Team doesn't actually want you to starve to death while working on the robot--and someone needed to bring you something from the mess hall, so I figured I might as well do it. I can manage to make Jack eat when he comes home, but you don't exactly sleep, do you?"

After a moment, he adds, "And yeah, okay, I wanted to check to see how it's going."

"I told you, death don't stick," he deadpans as he takes the plate. It's the kind of repetitive but toothless sniping that counts as friendly ribbing with him, at least if you're willing to let it.

Otherwise, it's just pedantry.

He actually doesn't say anything else for a second because he's pushing the hamburger to the side and filling his mouth with rice and gravy, which requires some kind of chewing before he can continue. Holy fuck. Gravy, he's pretty sure, is one of mankind's actual greatest inventions. Basic subsistence fare never tasted so good when he was a kid.

He glances behind him at the gradually-coming-together collections of moving parts. The actual back third is almost complete now, which means it's starting to look like a lot more than the haunting and wretched inhabitants of Strider's Island of Misfit Robotics: a long steel snake, an ominous pair of eyes in a skeletal metal basket, and a gigantic dish strung with a jungle of wires, and so on.

"And I fell asleep for a couple hours earlier, but I guess we're all just going to ignore that? Whatever. Status update is, I haven't strung any of the wires from the head through the neck at all yet, but that ass is watertight."

"Well yeah, it doesn't," Steven fires back, "but you sending yourself to a Pokecenter sure is going to delay the robot getting finished, isn't it?"

He's not bothered, though. This is the kind of mutual sniping he's fine with. It's not Dirk trying to pretend he's an authority over things he knows nothing about, after all.

"Nice to know about the ass," he adds. "So... where are we going to be riding if you can get it together?"

"Steven is going to have to endure Dirk talking around or at least between massive mouthfuls of gravy and rice. Now keenly aware of how long it had been since he'd eaten, stuffing his face with warm, real food is priority fuckin' one.

"Humans? They go in the shell."

But Dirk knows from experience that slowing down goes a long way towards making less food make you feel more full, so after the first few bites, he does start purposefully pausing a set minimum number of seconds before reloading. Talking helps fill the void there.

"The interior will eventually be insulated with rubber and glass, and the technical components will be embedded in that. Keeps us and the internals from turning into one of Tesla's electrifying wet dreams." He stabs the air with his utensil, waves it demonstratively like the arcane gestures are going to mean jack-all to Steven somehow.

Pause. More eating.

Chewing. Swallowing.

"That's also why producing a chassis that's one hundred percent watertight is a goddamn necessity."

Steven nods. "Right. That makes sense." And it does. He's not much of an engineer--well, he's not really any kind of engineer at all, just the guy who hands his boyfriend tools when he's allowed to--but he's got enough basic knowledge to see how all of those things are pretty goddamn necessary.

"What about the head? Anything go in that?"

"So would you say the food was just an excuse or more of a bribe?"

The inquiry is purely for scientific purposes. Obviously.

As are Steven's, no doubt.

"The head is mostly plating and insulation as a precautionary measure. Boring but practical. It wouldn't need to be that way, but I've fitted it with eyecams, like the BroPro. Except better, and manually operated for more control. Still haven't totally worked out whether to engineer a mandible.... more openings means more points of vulnerability. Same with joints, and moving parts in general. The pros might outweigh the cons, so I haven't quite given up on it, but it'd definitely be an added risk. I'm not a gambling man."

He just can't quite commit to abandoning the idea. There's a certain appeal to a robot that can open its mouth, in this case maybe seating a smallish Pokemon inside to attack, just like a real mecha.

He's also working with a serious handicap, the technology here being what it is. This is both an argument for and against the idea.

Steven shrugs. "It can't be both?"

Look, it's not like he's going to steal any of Dirk's ideas. He's not an engineer. Not a roboticist. He's a guy who thinks giant robots are cool and isn't really letting himself visit when his boyfriend is working on the robot, because it was really hard not to try drag Jack away from the project for the purposes of My Boyfriend Builds Giant Robots And That's So Hot quickies.

But, you know, the inherent eroticism of giant robots is easy to ignore with Dirk, who might be a friend (if an admittedly frequently annoying one) but is also a friend that Steven has zero interest in and wouldn't even if he were boyfriendless. Their little discussion the morning after the fossil heist had guaranteed that.

"Right," he says. "It's not like you can block the throat with, like, a beam weapon. If we want anything that shoots anything, we'd have to put a pokemon up there... and we'd want a way for them to get back down to us."

Funny. 'The inherent eroticism of giant robots' is one of the only ways Dirk could ever be persuaded to give in and fuck someone without months or years of antecedent homoerotic tension and psychosexual games of chicken.

"Who's 'we?'"

At this point he's scraping gravy and curry off the sides of the dish, but stops to regard Steven impassively, reflective blank blackness of his shades as impenetrable as they ever were in 2D. He drums his fingers on an exposed steel bar.

"I'm less concerned about getting whatever Pokemon back in a ball than I am about making the head an even bigger target than it already is."

Steven prioritising a Pokemon over the machinery is incomprehensible to him. It had not even remotely occurred to Dirk to worry about the Pokemon in this equation; Pokemon are game constructs, and correspondingly indestructible. More to the point, he thought he'd made it clear before that the game itself didn't matter.

"If the only beam weapons are going to come from cramming some Pokemon in there and letting it loose Hyper Beams or something, there's a good chance that return fire is going to be aimed accordingly."

"The people inside the robot...?" Steven says, frowning slightly. "Which, you know, is presumably our little group of Rockets? But yeah, okay, sure. That would make it a target."

He's really not a professional here. He's just a guy who thinks mecha are cool and sexy.

'We.' Always 'we' lately, especially from Steven. Who seems to have delusions of familiarity, making this operation into some little touchy-feely found family ordeal...

A nicer word for Dirk's feelings about that is 'exhausting.'

"Nothing personal, you do have a point. Being able to weaponise the thing would be one hell of a statement. Just don't consider my schema an open forum. After I spent seven years stuck with Rumble In Da Pumpkin Patch because of a Chittr poll, I got a lot less interested in outside input on my projects."

It's almost like an apology, if you can get around the ironically flippant tone of loathing and resentment at the end.

"... I've been toying with the idea of trying to fit two smaller Pokemon, something like those paired festival battles last month."

"Yeah, no, I've said a bunch of times already: I'm not an engineer. I'm not even a programmer, really. I'm just a guy who likes giant robots."

Sure, he knows how basic coding structures should work, but that's only because his father is a programmer and sometimes you pick these things as you go. He does not, actually, know any programming languages. HTML doesn't count, that's mark-up language and anyone who was on the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s knows basic HTML anyway. All his STEM-based knowledge revolves around recording technology, shit he's picked up through science fiction and years of reading his dead uncle's pathology textbooks.

"Paired Pokemon, though... that could be cool with the right pair."

Edited 2020-03-16 20:01 (UTC)

Steven is obviously confused about the source of the conflict. Dirk recognises that much, at least. His ability to recognise that this might, just maybe, have something to do with his communication skills and strategies, however.... well, let's just say it's no wonder Steven is confused.

Dirk, of course, only shakes his head at him.

And then doesn't clarify jack.

"Yeah, the combination is either going to make or break us."

There, is that better? He said 'us.'

He regrets it already. He doesn't need Steven getting any more ideas. Fuck. How do you get someone off your back without encouraging whatever agenda they have? He doesn't need or want Steven to hate him, or think he hates him, he just... ugh. Fuck.

"I have half an idea, but half an idea ain't wholeass nothing."

Steven glances around, finds some junk that looks like it's not being used anymore, and takes a seat on it, leaning forward toward Dirk. "So talk it through with me. Pretend I'm a rubber duck and we're debugging a program. Maybe I can help. And if I can't, the act of explaining it might help you figure it out on your own." He shrugs. "And, you know, it's me. You know I'm not going to crit you on morality, just how feasible or smart it is and, you know, if it's a correct use of your resources."

See, talking strategy with Dirk? That was something he can do without worrying Dirk was going to bring all his stupid-ass presumptions and retrograde opinions into this shit.

Knowing about rubber duck debugging doesn't prevent Dirk's brain from instantaneously producing the entire Sesame Street song, complete with video and puppetted choreography.

Which is less distracting than you'd think, because this happens all the time in the free-association free-for-all of Dirk's metatextually liberated superconsciousness, where 'all' turns out to involve a lot of free agents.

He blinks, once.

Then he snorts, "You're going to judge me, huh."

He shakes his head again before tipping his head back and closing his eyes, the better to re-organise his recently-scattered thoughts.

"The limitations are... size, motility... and individual strategic purpose takes a back seat to synergism or coaction. Greninja is easy to place, with broad dually defensive capabilities, long range multipurpose offensive capabilities for a single target. Plus Surf and Whirlpool, which have their uses." He opens his eyes.

"Also, it's mine. Cannot understate the importance of having some fucking control over what's happening up there."

In case it wasn't obvious: he has secretly, privately been giving this a lot of thought, at least in the background of his mind.

The corners of his mouth turn down.

"What complements that, though."

"Only on practicality," Steven says, mildly. "Not on morality." He drums his fingers on his knee. "And... hm. I can think of two ways you could go with this. One of them, which I learned through my own double battles in Lavender, is to pair your damage-dealer with something that can inflict a lot of status effects. Another would be to target what you're likely to have to fight with its elemental weaknesses. Armin's primarily a water trainer, right? Do you have anything grass--or access to anything grass?"

Dirk takes no offense to the comment about his practicality--actually, Steven might have a point. He is.... not as adapted to this as he used to be. He likes to think of himself as flexible, as adaptable. And he is. He knows he is. He is nothing if not a polymath, a Renaissance man of the self, forged in his grand multiplicity from a postapocalypse where self-insufficiency was not an option.

He's also only ever shed limitations, not accrued them. The prosaic and the mundane, the pedestrian view, banal ground-hugging day-to-day life, and limits.

'Practical.'

"Yeah, there's the rub. Short version? No. Fermat's more of an in-your-face solution, and he and SIN together are like oil and water, but the oil rig's collapsed and the ocean is now on fire. Practically speaking, the only eldritch battle pet of choice I could pick out of my roster would be Peaches. You know, because she can just fucking Transform into any shit she sees. Which narrows my options back down to 'literally fucking anything.'"

Steven nods thoughtfully. "So," he says. "I don't have anything that Transforms. Would Peaches be able to use the other Pokemon's attacks? And-- would she be at the same level, so to say, as she would normally be when she's in their form or is she reduced down to their level? Because if she did keep her level and gained the other's attacks, she could copy my Charlotte, who's an electric type with a decent number of status moves. And her compound eyes make her very accurate."

"In order: yes, yes, and... let me guess, Charlotte's a spider."

It's not really a guess. Compound Eyes is an ability exclusive to a handful of Bug types, and as far as he knows, there's only one Bug type that's also Electric.

Also, Carly has one.

There's no possibly explaining his reluctance about spiders. He knows this. And it's irrational, because it's irrelevant. This is irrelevant.

Sigh.

"Maybe."

"I almost named her Shelob, but she was... kind of too cute for that," Steven admits. Look, it's the obvious name for a spider Pokemon.

"Well. Think about it. I'm sure someone else would let you copy theirs too if there's something else someone else has that would work better."

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