tushanshu_logs | EVENT | LANDFALL | KITHIKA

EVENT | LANDFALL | KITHIKA | DRAGON

Characters: ALL!
Date: February 12th - 28th
Location: Keeliai
Situation: The discovery of an artifact from the first war against Malicant reveals the land of Kithika within a dimension of the Death Plane... and just happens to be contained inside a bottle.
Warnings/Rating: Please indicate content warnings in subject headers as applicable.

OOC INFORMATION ♦ CITY OF KEELIAI ♦ INSIDE THE BOTTLE ♦ THE WORLD EATER
For nearly two days the brave quest takers have been sequestered at the sullied Temple and its grounds, the thick jungle and swamp preventing them from leaving. There are faint tremors that run through the ground and in the middle of the third night, the ground gives a great heave, jostling everyone from their rested states. In one of the Temple rooms, a sinkhole has appeared to reveal not spongy ground beneath, but a dark tunnel leading down into the earth. It doesn't take much to widen the entrance and follow the gentle downward slope that leads out to the north, and a walk of about two hours (which surely would feel like longer to those who don't enjoy being trapped in low, dank places) leads them under the swamp itself. By the time the tunnel slopes upward, the muddy ground has turned hard and packed with small chips of rock and sand; the terrain above is changing and as they emerge upward through a fissure in the ground...

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OOC NOTE: The Aftermath comment will be unfrozen and its direction posted on February 23rd, based on the outcome of the other threads.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He skips protesting that he knows how to keep delicate machinery clean. He's too interested. Sure, the components are simple enough things. He probably could have built a reasonable facsimile at home when he was just a kid. The point wasn't what was possible, but what someone had thought of. Elegant simplicity applied to a new and exciting problem is more than enough to catch his eye.

He might be getting ideas about how it might be improved or refitted to different purposes, or combined with other technologies he knows (burning fossil fuels, for instance, is an economic, technological, and environmental catastrophe, and how would the cables work with web shooters?), but he keeps his mouth shut for the time being and wanders down to the edge of the water. "So, uh, that was fun. Think that was my first dragon."

If Kurt can figure out a different fuel source for the thing, by all means, please share! Armin can't practice with it as often as he'd like because he has a limited amount of gas. If he didn't have the worry about powering his gear, he'd have another small advantage against the Titan shifters here.

"Your first? Have you not met Temeraire?" Armin could probably relax in the water all day, but he begins to wade back towards Kurt, "Of course, he's a much more manageable size, but he says he's a dragon. This one had to have been some kind of... Titan dragon."

"I wasn't counting friendlies, though I guess I should. Land in enough alternate worlds and just about everyone you know will be evil and homicidal in one of them." He's probably too reconciled to that. He wanders closer to the water and wades in a few inches. He doesn't wear shoes--too hard to fit on his feet and they get in the way of his acrobatics--so that's an easy transition. "Don't come out on my account. Beach time is a pretty fair trade for all that nonsense."

"Temeraire is quite friendly, and very smart. Although I might be partial to him because he's military as well," he says off-handedly, and sits in the sand where the tide laps in and out over him. It's such a strange and pleasant sensation, "You don't have to come in either. I'll start to prune in a moment-- and you don't have to get your fur damp."

"It dries pretty fast, honestly, but the frizz problems make me look like one of those bunnies you can make sweaters out of." So he'll let himself be persuaded, though he does dip his tail into the gentle surf. A warm ocean feels odd to him, remembering as he does the cool, rough Sound back home. Nice, though. "That makes sense though. The military thing, I mean. Everyone I've met who's done the army thing gets along with everyone else, basically."

"There's a sort of mentality, yes. 'Getting along' is something we have to do to survive, so we all learn the same way to do it. To make things simple."

He buries his hands in the sand, and feels something hard and smooth. He fishes it out and examines the shell-- it's not the same shape as the one he found at Bresilyk, but he can tell it's the same sort of thing.

"I'm sure I'll sound like a moron for asking," Armin admits, somewhat embarrassed, showing the shell to Kurt, "but what is this? They're all over where the land meets the sea... What sort of forces would cause a rock to form this way?"

Kurt's been to a world where everything was ocean and one where most people had never left the desert they lived in, one where science didn't work reliably... He doesn't believe in stupid questions. And fortunately, while he's not a biologist, he's a sponge for all kinds of information. And really liked the natural history museum. "An animal made it, actually. It's built the same way as our bones, only on the outside, not the inside. They live inside the shell so predators can't get at them. It's just an accident that they look super spiffy to us." He almost goes into fossilization and limestone, but that would lead down a very long road that might go nowhere, if Armin hadn't happened to live on top of any deposits like that. "You can do all kinds of cool stuff with them, too," he finishes instead.

"Oh. So it's sort of like a skeleton then, left over from something that died."

Armin curiously peers into the hole in the shell. A very, very small creature must have lived in there. He thought since the ocean was so big, that only very big things would live in it, like Asti. He must've been wrong.

"You're right, it's a very interesting shape to be part of an animal. It looks like something a woman would wear as jewelery... What sorts of things can you do with them?"

"Well, jewelry is one, or just for display, or studying the animals that lived in them. You can carve them into tools, and when there's enough of them and enough time passes they turn into stone that's great for building stuff." Oops, fossils got in there anyway. "And there's one kind that can be used as an instrument!" That might be more Armin's speed. "We might even be able to find one if we really looked. This beach seems kind of tropical."

"I may someday. I'd like to come back here, eventually," right now, his legs are starting to cement where they're sitting. He... May have a difficult time making it all the way back to the Wood Sector.

Armin sighs. It's nice enough, being here with a friend, but he longs for his comrades. For Eren and Mikasa. Someone he could really share this joy with. Hell, even Jean could probably get excited over something like this.

"...It was a dream of mine, to see the ocean one day," he says quietly, "a promise I made with friends. We would kill all the Titans and see the ends of the Earth. This feels a little cheap without them."

"I know what you mean," Kurt agrees. Armin is in many ways easier to get along with than some of his teammates, but it's still not right being without them. Even if it's not something anybody could help at this point. "About the friends, I mean. I grew up next to an ocean. But last time I took a beach break after a big one I had everybody with me." That had been such an awesome couple of hours. Sandwiched between some real soul-destroying awfulness, of course, but still about the happiest he knew how to be.

"We're both misplaced, aren't we?" he sighs, rinsing off his shell and creakily standing up. He still had to put his engine back together, and find out however it is you're supposed to get out of this place, "a couple of brains picked out of our teams. I don't think I'll ever stop feeling disoriented."

"As the voice of experience when it comes to being dropped in another universe, nah, you probably won't. There's no way to get used to infinite possibilities." Kurt smiles as encouragingly as he can, allowing for fangs. It probably wouldn't even be a good idea to be perfectly comfortable with a new dimension. It was hard enough moving to a new apartment. "Who knows, maybe some of our people will show up. Or hey, maybe you'll just be able to bring back cool extra stuff." Since Armin's world, if memory serves, could definitely use a boost from any number of resources the turtle people had to offer. It was a minor slip, not including himself in that proposition. He can't go back to anywhere, after all.

Armin thinks nothing of it, since it's fairly common knowledge around here that people are simply returned to their home worlds when their time here is up. He figures the same thing would happen to Kurt, even if he was a dimension traveler.

"I would hope that I would be able to bring back some memory of this place, although everyone tells me that's not how it works," he says, offering Kurt a wary smile in return and sitting down in front of the neat pile of parts he had made to put his engine back together again, "people in my world would definitely think I'm crazy, but... People already think everyone in the Scouting Legion is insane anyways. It's not much of a leap."

Edited 2014-02-26 20:29 (UTC)

"The trick is being useful-crazy," Kurt suggests, leaning down a little to watch him work. "That's a real efficient little machine, there. I'd like to meet the engineer behind it." Usually there were trade-offs, sacrificing power or size or weight or a dozen other problems one for another, but from what Armin had told him about Titans, he could see why there was no room for any leeway. "...Has to be a real fuel-hog, though." Or it wouldn't work at all. Hmm.

"It's the pride of the military. It was originally developed decades ago, not long after the walls were built... or so I'm told," Armin says with pride as he begins to re-assemble the engine with a quick and practiced hand, "but you're right. The cable mechanism works with a fairly small amount of gas, but only the best of the best can get around without having to use the jets as well, to correct their trajectory. Careless use can drain your fuel reserves very quickly."

"When we last made landfall, I bought a large amount of natural gas, so I do have a supply. But I still can't practice as often as I would like. You never know when a disaster will happen, and I may need it all at once."

"You'd need something powerful, but if you could get a battery running it would probably be a smoother operator." A small fusion reactor would be perfect, but he doubted he could get that going in a hurry here. Maybe one of those Stark arc reactors? He'd never worked with one personally, but... "You might even be able to get it to charge the battery itself if you could make sure the generator didn't get in the way of the functionality of the cables." He knows all about surprise disasters, after all.

Woah, wait, one new word at a time please.

"...What's a battery? And a... a generator?"

"Um..." He'll never learn, apparently. "Well, your engine here would count as a generator. That just means a thing that makes power. I'm just thinking of a kind that works by agitating a certain metal alongside a magnet." Is magnet okay? He's pretty sure magnetism is naturally occurring, but Armin doesn't even know about shellfish, so if his very limited experience didn't happen to overlap any sources of particular iron ores. "Nevermind. It makes power, the same as burning fuel. There are just... better ways to do that. Including some batteries, which are just any object that you can extract power from, usually from a chemical or radioactive reaction. Just... a different power source. Something lighter and longer lasting, and less polluting." He's from a world of all-green energy. That people fighting Titans wouldn't really care about a bit of smoke in the air doesn't occur to him.

"So it's... um..."

Armin lets that all rattle around in his head for a bit. He still didn't know exactly how the electricity in his suite worked, just that you plug the thing in and flip the switch and you get what you want. These things must be the same kind of technological magic. It confuses him, from living in a world of very bleak absolutes, but he's not adverse to embracing it at all. Whatever works best!

"So you're saying that if my gear was run using a 'battery' to power it, I could use it for a longer period of time before having to fill the battery up again?"

"Ideally. If I could get a good internal generator going it might be able to recharge itself to a certain degree, too. I mean, I've mostly seen that done with flashlights that wear your hand out because you have to shake the generator yourself, but if I could get this coil system to do that for me... That and you can carry a lot more batteries than you can cans of gas. Just plug and play." The system itself, while he suspects it could probably be improved, is something he knows a lot less about. He's having enough fun now.

"You mean that the engine itself could make energy? Is that was a generator is?"

Having fit in the final piece of the mechanical puzzle, Armin lifts his engine and inspects it from all sides. That makes even less sense to him, how something that uses energy could make it too, but who is he to question it?

"You couldn't make it that efficient, but it'd be good for a burst of reserve power or just to extend battery life. But if we could rig it up with something like the Sternes-Banner fusion reactors I had at home... Probably wouldn't work too well, though. There's just not the infrastructure for stuff like that here. I did somehow end up working for Tony Stark, though, so I can ask around, make it a take-home project." He pauses. "...Better make a mockup of yours first. I don't wanna mess with the only one you got."

"You think you can make a duplicate? Really?"

Armin lets all the rest of that just wash over him, because damn, that's really impressive.

"Well, a mock-up for testing, and I'd have to make some kind of adapter. But I worked on an old-school internal combustion engine once, and it's do-able. There were people back home who converted classic cars to work on clean engines." So it's possible. "...Just the internal stuff, though. The blades are probably unnecessary at this point. Don't suppose you know anything about the makeup of the cables?" So he's showing off a little. He doesn't get a lot of chances.

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