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."

Look, robots are cool. Especially giant robots. Especially-especially giant robots made for nefarious purposes may or may not have an additional cool factor, depending on how guilty Connie is feeling about being a rocket on any given day. (Robots made for stealing an endangered species out of a safe habitat are significantly less cool, but Connie's doing her level best not to think about that particularly hard.) So Connie has come into the lab to observe... and to hand exactly the tool he needs.

She's picked up a few tricks from DIYing her Mach Bike.

Oftentimes, Jack's actual talents and skills don't get much use in Pokeworld. His plans are the very slow and long running subtle types that require manipulation of far more moving parts than he has access to here, and his robotics and engineering genius finds an outlet in doodling death traps that will never be made.

But every so often an opportunity comes along.

And when he'd noticed what Dirk was doing, he'd strutted into the lab with his hands in the pockets of his stupidly expensive designer jeans and a grin on his face. He'd been eager beneath all his usual bravado and posturing....

But once he actually started working, all of that melted away. Jack's focus was only on the project, the quips and jokes and rambling stories gone and replaced by tight lipped, silent concentration.

Or at least mostly silent.

"Hey Dirk, c'mere a sec." Jack's standing at a workbench, staring down at a pad of graph paper on which he's jotted down some notes and figures and hasty, out of context sketches of small parts of the robot. "Both on account of we've been at this for hours without a break and also I think I've got an idea on how to streamline the jointed segments for smoother motion. Hardest friggin part of any kind of mobile robot, and the bigger they are... And I know, I know it doesn't matter if it moves organically, but smoother joint segments mean smoother overall motion in general and I figure we want that in a mobile, aquatic base."

And besides that, it's the principle of the thing. Why build anything if it's not going to be the best possible whatever you can build?

Tyler doesn't exactly make a habit out of seeking out Dirk. It's a bit tricky to be friends with Psychic Ground Zero when your only real mainstay companion is a Psychic bird that hates him.

But, well. They work in the same place now, so he ought to try and play nice for a bit. Even if the guy is a grade-A douche, it's the kind of low-level asshole fuckery that Tyler can get behind. And frankly, he misses that kind of banter.

When he finds Dirk working in his personal lab, or whatever the fuck he might call it (is he the kind of person that would sincerely call it his lair? Tyler thinks Dirk is), he sends a text message first.

Your shift starts in half an hour, you know. Eat some fucking breakfast.

This is very shortly followed - literally, shortly as in Tyler waits for Dirk to actually look at the message and read it for half a second - by a sealed ziploc bag, containing a greasy-looking cheese and bacon toasted sandwich, being hurled with surprising accuracy at Dirk's head.

When Jack had first turned up with an agenda and a determination to make Dirk accommodate it, Dirk was about as accommodating as he (n)ever is, and it took some intense and deadly serious negotiations before he "let" Jack anywhere near his stupid, overambitious plans (and the new pet project at the centre of that.)

And it had been tense, at first. Especially when Jack kept talking.

But as it become gradually apparent that he did know his dick from a drillbit, and in fact knew about more than the base mechanical engineering tasks Dirk had wanted to quarantine him to (with no real success)... it got easier. Almost easier than doing it all himself. Almost.

Because he didn't dare get too comfortable. At least he's stopped radiating tension and hostility. Even if part of it is that he and Jack share a tendency toward hyperfocus when they really get to work, or at least a very intense monofocus.

And he's actually quite interested in what Jack has to say.

Though there's a short delay before he responds to the sound of a human voice at all; he's riveting, god damn it, and he can't and won't stop until he's done with the panel.

He peels himself away from starting the next one only begrudgingly, and only having absorbed like... half of what Jack said.

"What? I mean, I heard part of that." His hair is plastered to his face unpleasantly, and his awareness of that has been increasingly difficult to ignore. Getting work done is basically the only possible means of (not) stopping himself, so now he's scrubbing at his face violently with his hands.

"Uh. Yeah, unless we're dedicating our collective effort to utilising distinctly unnatural movements or eliminating motion all together, then we're going to want to replicate the natural motion as best we can, just for reasons of pure functionality... and shit, if that's our angle then why the fuck not go for gold. So shoot your shot, what's the notion."

He tucks his hair up into his hairline, pushing his glasses back up over his face. Pauses.

"....I mean, as long as it's not [OOCLY REDACTED SLUR USE] then I'll probably let you try. Think I said so before, but I never made so much as a fucking boat before this thing."

"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?"

The first time Connie just has the socket wrench he was looking for waiting in hand, ready for him almost(?) faster than he could turn around, he just took it. No word of thanks, no additional gesture or visible reaction, no change of expression. The element of surprise actually ensured the absence of that response.

The second time, it was a screwdriver bit, and there was a second's longer pause before he went back to work. That time he was talking, and the beat of elongated silence hung between words somewhere in the middle of the sentence. (The sentence itself was a long, meandering quasi-dissemination on Timaeus and the shape(s) of the universe, frogs, and the theoretical scope of the exact dimensions of the universe they were currently inhabiting. The topic had started as an observation on the repetition of forms and concepts between realities [for example, frogs] but had taken a sharp left turn somewhere.)

The third time was a different bit and this time he jerked his head up slightly--a short, wordless mark of approval.

Eventually he dropped that one--he really didn't set anything down, ever, he just fucking dropped it like an astronaut--and found her there again. Not handing him something, though, which was just as well because there are very few good ways to hand someone an entire welding torch and tank.

He raises one eyebrow, purposefully.

It isn't really "Dirk's" lab so much as it's the lab he started in and rapidly crowded everyone else out of, thereby precluding any other possible labelling based on use alone.

So the same way a lot of things become Dirk's, ultimately.

Pun intended.

Anyway.

He has not read the text message, and whether or not he even knows he received one is dubious. That would be a nice explanation for the lag between the incoming projectile and his hand, anyway. He catches it, yeah, but messily--the mess might be contained in the bag, but it's a pretty nasty price for any cool points he might have earned by intercepting the thing without looking up.

He regards the ex-sandwich silently for a moment, shrugs, and pops the bag open.

Then he checks his messages.

Then he sends one back. In that order.

You didn't even ask if I keep Kosher first.

"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)

"Oh, really? Okay, then." Taking that as her cue, Connie straps on the mask and tank, then begins picking up where Dirk left off.

connie that probably isn't what he meant,

I did not, no. That would be because nothing here is actually kosher - or halal, since you're being anal-retentive, but I'm more familiar with the latter - because I am one hundred percent certain Judaism as a concept doesn't exist here.

Now if you'd just said 'vegetarian' instead then I would absolutely be in the wrong for assuming, but since you decided to try and take the 'holier than thou' routine I am under no obligation to cater to your fuckery.

He sends it all with a straight face and a dry look, leaning casually on the doorway as he types.

Also since you're being a dick about it, that sandwich was 50 bucks so either pay up or eat up.

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."

Dirk reacts partway on instinct--instinct that may or may not be 'his' in the traditional sense but which is wholly his in every way that matters.

His hand shoots out faster than conscious thought, but in perfect time with the thoughts that motivate it. He doesn't grab the torch. He grabs Connie--scarred, calloused hand closing over hers roughly as he jerks her arm up--or tries to, anyway, the intent being both immobilisation and neutralisation.

Also, it's a direction that doesn't leave the flame on his robot or aimed in anyone's face, so at least his instincts had that covered.

Good thing this shit is basically Monopoly money.

Like being back on Earth C. Boonbucks printed in absurd quantities, values maintained solely by the power of belief in those values.

He opts to just sort of push the mess of carbs and protein up from the bottom, biting into it as it starts to emerge from the bag for minimal mess. Like a freezie pop, or a tube of toothpaste.

That's one thing the big guy and economics have in common.

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.

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He's Going The Distance (Open)

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this is going to feed into dirk's presumptions even more and i hatelove it

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This was the stupidest tag I could have written, probably

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Its beautiful

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YIKES (TM)

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