tushanshu_logs | What could possibly go wrong amirite

Entry tags:

What could possibly go wrong amirite

Characters: Hiro Hamada, Stork, & Tony Stark
Date: May the 4th ~~be with you~~
Location: Starting out in Central at the Hotel; moving to Metal Sector after that
Situation: Black Market shopping; situations of dubious legality; nerds getting in trouble, probably
Warnings/Rating: None at the present, will edit if needed.

Hiro loves his brother, really. And is concerned for him. He just doesn't know what to do with him right now. He feels guilty for lying, he misses his aunt even though he won't say it out loud, and it's all a lot of pressure and it's weird right now and he needs to get away and not deal with it for a little while.

So he's gonna go bother Stork instead.

He pokes his head in the Hotel's garage and, true to form, the Merb (but what is a Merb) is there hunched over some project or the other, apparently not having noticed him yet. Hiro really doesn't think about this; he skips into the garage unannounced, just about tripping over himself in the process, and pops up next to Stork's workbench with a grin on his face.

"Hey, hey, check this out."

Why is Hiro wearing gloves?

He claps his hands together, eliciting a sharp buzz, a shower of sparks and five points of bright blue light at the interior of the knuckles where they meet.

That's why.

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There are a number of ways to subtly introduce yourself to a conversation that hasn't started yet, but that approach isn't the recommended one for Merbs. As is fairly well evidenced by the way Stork pops off his seat like a released coil spring with a half-yelp, half-screech, jumping an actual ten feet into the air -- high enough that he actually bangs his head off the ceiling of the garage's work area while clinging to the ceiling rafter.

"Don't do that!!"

"Woah!" Hiro yelps, wincing at the bang as Stork hits the ceiling. And then doesn't come down. His eyes are drawn upward, and his jaw drops open. He realizes after a second that he's staring and not really helping and parts his hands again, effectively stopping the sparkleworks. "Uh, sorry."

He shuffles his feet, ducking his head apologetically, but still curious.

"You sure you're not a kangaroo? You could play basketball. They'd love you in the NBA."

"I'm a Merb," Stork repeats, for what seems like the umpteenth time since arriving in Keeliai. When he ascertains there's no danger, he unwinds his fingers and drops lightly down to the floor again, the height hardly an afterthought.

"You shouldn't sneak up on people like that. And I've played basketball." He lived with teenagers, after all, and they occasionally wanted something a little more involved than Berry Blitz while staying shipside. "I don't know what NBA stands for, though."

He perked up, looking at Hiro's gloves. "Those are new."

"National basketball association, a.k.a. it's a national pastime where I come from. You could go pro. You got some sick air there." Barring the raised eyebrows from recruiters over a green...rabbit....person. Whatever. It's 2032 back home, let the green man play.

Hiro grins and raises his hands, palms out, clicking thumb and forefinger nodes together to produce a smaller spark effect. "High-voltage stun gloves. Very effective for self-defense in a pinch." He raises an eyebrow. "Parts acquired special from the, uh...supplier I told you about before."

Stork gives a shudder and shakes his head. "No, there are way too many germs in any kind of professional organization like that. Besides, I don't like that kind of attention." A second quiver as he remembered having to go on stage at Terra Neon, and then he was quick to shunt that terrible recollection to the back of his brain once more.

Hiro's gloves were a welcome distraction though, and the pilot's ears perked right up as he examined them. "I like these," he said. "What kind of battery are you using for the charge? What type of current are they carrying. You could make it so they have short range as well as contact, too."

Hiro beams in spite of himself, soaking up the attention - outside of his brother and the bot fighters at home, it's not like he's exactly had a lot of opportunities to show off. Not a lot of opportunities that didn't end in getting locked in a janitorial closet for being a mouthy little nerd. But Stork's cool, and Stork likes (and understands) tech, so...yeah, Hiro thinks he likes Stork.

"Not anything fancy," he says, shrugging casually but still grinning anyway. "I ripped the power supplies out of some kedan junk and wired them up to the electrodes, plus made sure they could charge off the electrical system the city already has in place. Theoretically the current's not more than a few hundred amperes, but - I don't have anything to measure that with."

He purses his lips. "Lightning fingers would be cool. Could shoot bolts out of your hands like some kinda crazy supervillain, that'd be cool." He spreads his hands out, and of course nothing happens because he hasn't rigged it for that yet, but the idea's there. He glances at Stork. "You like? I could show you where to get stuff to rig up your own. What with all the crazy muggings going on, it might not be a bad idea."

Edited 2015-05-16 02:58 (UTC)

"No supervillany," Stork said, whapping Hiro off the top of the head with the handle of a set of pliers. "There are enough crazy people here as it is. Do you have any idea how many types of mind-worms could be infecting the kedan, with the way they shapeshift? I swear, if I have to deal with one more teenage megalomaniac..."

The rest of the grouse dissolved into grumblings, but he went digging in his toolbox and pulled out a frequency scanner. It was used for crystals, but he tinkered with it for a couple of minutes and then passed it to Hiro.

"Here, try this for measuring the amperage," he said. "And don't worry, I can make my own defenses. I have the Condor rigged for safety."

"I was kidding! Ow," he hisses, hands going automatically to cover the top of his head as he trails Stork across the workshop - until he remembers, just shy of giving himself a bad hair day (and probably worse) that he shouldn't do that. He freezes in place and slowly lowers his arms, taking the scanner only after he switches off the current in the right-handed glove.

He clicks thumb and forefinger together again to measure the output, but he's only sort of paying half attention, his very small store of patience quickly running out. "Come on, dude, I keep dropping hints and you keep not taking them! You should go with me to this cool back-alley market they've got, I swear there's stuff there you won't find anywhere else." A beat. "Also, because I'm not technically supposed to go by myself."

Stork seems surprised by the impatience, stopping what he was doing and lowering his pliers. "I said I'd go with you," he answered. The lure of materials not easily found anywhere else in the city was too much for a mechanic like the merb to ignore, plus the last part that Hiro had said. He wasn't about to let the kid go by himself; Hiro wasn't that much older than the Sky Scouts were.

"You didn't say it was now."

"Oh." Heh. Hiro carefully switches off the other glove before tucking his hands behind his back, grinning sheepishly. "Well...consider this me telling you, maybe?"

There's a pause, for a couple of seconds, before he adds hastily. "I ran out of some stuff I needed and I can't get it anywhere else and Callaghan's busy right now."

Hiro, don't make that face. Adults can't resist that face. ~~that's totally the plan~~

"Okay, okay. Let me get my bag..." One Stork has his messenger bag, he nods. "Lead the way... I guess."

Hiro perks up immediately, like maybe he was only half-expecting that to get him anywhere and is pleasantly surprised to find Stork agreeing to accompany him so readily. "Really?" He asks at first, and then, "Oh, sweet. C'mon, we can try to take a shortcut through the main doors - I know they're bugged right now, but they only wig out every so often. I think we can risk it."

He finds a spot to set down the frequency scanner Stork loaned him and then sort of hop-skips out of the garage with the Merb in tow, babbling on about their destination. "So, when we get there, you gotta act casual - if you don't they'll try to rip you off for all you're worth. Give 'em the cool, level-headed act, like you're not that interested in anything they're selling. Be above it all. You get better deals that way -"

Tony is headed to the garage to see if he can scrounge up a couple odds and ends he doesn't have in his own stash of engineering miscellanea. He's absorbed in his notes, chewing a pencil and staring down at his schematics as he walks - which is why he walks straight into a certain excitable young teen heading the other way.

"Whoa!" Tony fumbles for his notebook, just managing to snag it and the pencil before they both go tumbling to the floor. "Sorry, totally didn't see you. Hey, Stork. Where are you guys headed?"

The question is automatic, purely conversational in a and-where-are-you-off-to-in-such-a-hurry kind of way, but now that he's said it, he is actually curious where the two other engineers are going.

"Uh," Stork says, doing an impressively awkward freeze on the spot, while he shoots Hiro a look.

"That's... we're... um."

"Secret mission," Hiro covers, fast on the uptake for somebody who's still trying to recover his balance after nearly getting knocked on the floor. "But actually, we're just going to the market. So it's more like a secret shopping trip."

No mention of which market, or where it's located, at least not to current strangers, though as he dips slightly to one side and tilts his head to glance at the notebook, he has his suspicions; mainly because he only knows of two engineers staying in the hotel right now, one of which is conspicuously green, and the other is the elusive but much-talked-about Tony Stark.

Also, he'd like to divert attention from where they're going. "Whatcha workin' on?"

"Wow, and I though I was a bad liar," Tony jokes. Hiro's attempted coverup might have convinced him, but Stork's deer-in-headlights freeze couldn't have looked more guilty if he'd been wearing a burglar costume and had pantyhose pulled over his head. "I'm working on some modifications to the suit's sonic disruptors. What are you really up to?"

He's not going to be distracted that easily, Hiro.

Ironically, Stork actually can lie with the best of them, but he's terrible on the spot with people he's less familiar with.

"We're going to the market," he echoed Hiro with an emphatic nod, before looking interested and safely getting off topic. "Wait, sonic disruptors?"

"The market. The...slightly illegal market..." He's half-mumbling as he says it and skims past pretty quickly, shooting Stork a look, because oh my god he totally knows now, dude. Also, he's totally going to keep trying to change the subject, smiling brightly and folding his hands behind his back. "...Anyway what's a sonic disruptor do? Because it sounds like it does something awesome."

"It's one of the weapons on my suit. It's, you know - sonic. It causes disorientation without hurting people." And has other niche uses, such as shattering laser-focusing crystals so he doesn't get sliced into iron spaghetti. "I'm recalibrating them so I can generate a wider range of frequencies and intensities." He rushes through the explanation, because he's a lot more interested in what Hiro just mumbled under his breath.

"The— hold on, are you going to the black market?"

Tony had been deeply suspicious of Keeliai's black market at first: at home, there'd been a brisk black market trade in stolen Stark tech, which had not exactly endeared him to the institution. But he'd eventually come to terms with the fact that Keeliai's black market was a necessary evil, and often a useful one. Especially because it was the best place to find foreigner stuff. If something got stolen from a foreigner, or something randomly appeared from another universe and was found by a kedan, the black market was where it was likely to end up.

Which is why, instead of trying to talk them out of it, Tony just asks "...Can I come?"

Stork immediately suspects that, if they were to refuse, Tony would do the same thing Hiro would do: go and try to find this place on his own. Safety in numbers, and all that.

Well, mostly safety in a well-placed booby trap, but he'd settled for numbers in lieu of those.

"I... guess so?" he hedged, glancing at Hiro.

Oh shit, nail on the head and all that. Hiro winces. So much for subtlety. He glances at Stork, brain already hacking away at a solution on the spot. He finds it pretty quickly, edging closer to Tony and dropping his voice lower.

"Okay, fine. But you gotta be cool, and not tell anybody, and—" A beat. "And I wanna see one of those sonic disruptors, later. Deal?"

Hiro that was not supposed to be part of the deal but too late, already threw that in there. He's milking this one for what it's worth.

Much in the way that a plan never survives first contact with the enemy, subtlety rarely survives first contact with Tony.

Tony grins. "Cool." And, to Hiro specifically: "I'll show you the whole suit, if you want."

Hiro's other conditions are also acceptable: Tony has no reason to blab about the illicit field trip. (Though, if Cass corners him unexpectedly, all bets are off.)

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What could possibly go wrong amirite

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omg I lost this

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