ic Kids Table (IC)

[Avenger Assembled]

"Charlie likes to play tricks," Mia informed Ryder. "He is very tricky." Turning to the nearby ball, she said firmly, "Mizz Erin! Charlie is playing tricks!" 

 

Eira made a strangled noise at the back of her throat and bolted right out the sliding door. The lock on the door next to the science lab took no more time to open than it did to make the connection with her dataspike. The door slid open, revealing a substantial room at least twice the size of the laboratory where the teenagers had been working in breadth, depth, and length. It was full of plastic see-through shelves, stacked floor-to-ceiling with a dizzying array of gadgets and gear, the overhead lights flickering as if something had recently interrupted their power. There was no immediate sign of where the boy had gone - at first glance, anyway. 

 

The sign on the door of the second room said IMPOUND - NON-HAZARDOUS. 

[Gizmo]

Ryder ran out into the hallway after Eira, startled by the abrupt discarding of her frosty indifference to the children. "What?! What-- oh, jeez." He raised both hands to his hair as he read the sign, nail polish dripping onto the shoulder of his hoodie from the brush he was still holding."Hey Charlie? Buddy?" he called into the expansive room, hesitant to enter without knowing what he was looking at.

 

That indecision lasted only a moment before the teen squared his shoulders. "Yellow, see if you can spot him down one of the hallways, okay? I'll take a closer look here." The robotic wasp buzzed in affirmation before zipping down the hallway and around the corner. "So probably a 'don't touch anything' situation?" he asked Eira while moving to walk past her into the impound room.

[Avenger Assembled]

After a moment's consideration, Eira led the way inside the room's front entrance, looking skeptically at the flickering lights, some of which were inside the shelving units themselves (and had no visible source) rather than the overhead lights themselves. There were several 'corridors' inside the big storage room, each of them indifferently lit. "His passage must have disrupted the electromagnetic frequencies inside the equipment," she said, the prospect seeming to fill her with real unease. "Be wary of discharge. And no, do not touch anything. Chaaarlie," she called uncertainly, "come out and we will give you chocolate." She sounded as if she was making it up as she went along. If Charlie was out there in the storage corridors somewhere, he did not seem impressed. 

[Electra]

The lights in the lab dimmed briefly,  a moment of darkness passing from row to row of lights overhead as though the room were going under a scanner bar or copy machine before returning to normal. A hologram flickered to life in the center of the room, a sturdily built brunette woman wearing a HAX security uniform and a no-nonsense expression. "Charles, you know you're not allowed to be in rooms that are not unlocked for you. If you make me have to come down and get you, I'm going to have to tell your parents what happened. I'd rather not do that, since I know you like visiting here." Her voice was cajoling, but there was no doubt she meant what she said. She paused a moment and cocked an eye at the teenagers. "I guess you're babysitting today?" she asked dryly. 

[Gizmo]

"Oh, hi! I have a smoothie for you!" Ryder greeted, stepping out from behind Eira to wave at the holographic projection. "I don't think we were supposed to be babysitting? Eira said we were in exile or maybe just she's in exile and I'm still working my way up to exile. I'm not sure if babysitting ranks above or below exile. Maybe there's a chart. I'm talking a lot." The teen rocked back and forth on his heels while scrubbing a hand through his tousled strawberry blonde hair. "The soccer ball is still keeping an eye on Mia, right? Maybe I should have asked Yellow to stay with her. This room is extremely spooky. Do we have chocolate? Sorry, rambling, sorry." His attention was apparently bouncing rapidly between scanning for Charlie, trying to identify the objects on the shelves, answering Mrs. Hunter-White and looking to Eira for guidance.

[Avenger Assembled]

Eira gave the hologram a mistrustful look, then seemed to decide that Ryder's engagement with Erin was the better part of valor. "We almost have him." 

 

And indeed, they almost did. 

 

Charles reappeared, half-obscured by the shelves on the rear wall. "I sorry," he said worriedly, small hands with still visible pink fingernails under his mouth. "I wanna be good. I like choc'olate." He stepped forward, his body partially phasing through the equipment nearby. And then the lights flickered on and off in the shelving he was passing, and Eira's eyes went wide with alarm. 

 

"Argh!" she called in surprise as lights lit up around a big metal disc mounted to the far wall, pulling her off her feet before she could react, across the room, and pinning her to the wall upside-down like a stuck fly, equipment crashing from her sudden fall. "Jag hatar magneter!" she declared loudly, pinioned with her head against the ground and her legs in the air. Upside-down, her labcoat flopped down over her torso and her hair went wild, suddenly limp as it dangled below her. 

With all the loud noise and sudden movement, Charlie's eyes popped big and he declared on the verge of tears, "Oh I'm in bad trouble now!" before turning and running away through the far wall!  

[Electra]

The hologram sighed very deeply before pressing a button on an offscreen console. "Maintenance team to Level One, Non-Hazardous Impound Lab." She toggled a different button and suddenly her voice was coming over the room's loudspeaker as well as the one in the hallway. "Charlie Protocol is now in place on Level One. Please secure any dangerous equipment and back up all data. Repeat, Charlie protocol is now in place on Level One." She looked over to Ryder and Eira, apparently  unfazed by the fact that Eira was upside down and stuck to the wall. "He rarely goes in the elevators or on the stairs when he's running around. See if you can track him down in the rooms near you." 

[Gizmo]

"Wow. That would be pretty cool if everyone wasn't so upset," Ryder remarked as he blinked at the wall upon which Eira had become stuck, grimacing in sympathy. He turned to give the security chief what was meant to be a reassuring smile and thumbs up. "But, uh, yeah! I'll get her down and then we'll find him no problem! Just need a little help with the elbow grease."

 

The teen unzipped his hoodie, uncovering an oversized belt buckle that looked for all the world to be a printer ink cartridge. Planting his feet, Ryder pressed each of the chambers in sequence. As he did a cheerful computerized voice announced, "CYMK! Dream in colour!"

 

Hands outstretched, Ryder commanded, "Chitin! Online!" A burst of displaced air kicked up around him, setting his hair and clothes flapping while ribbons of light bleeding through from the belt's dimensional pocket encircled his body. First a black jumpsuit materialized, then white and silver armour plates that audibly locked into place. A smooth helmet dominated by multifaceted oval eyes covered his face, humming to life with a soft white glow as the pocket closed and the wind died down.

 

"Alright! Now I-- buh?" As Chitin took a step toward the far wall he found himself abruptly pulled off balance before flying through the air as if yanked by an unseen rope. With a clang he crashed into the same metal disk on top of Eira, the metallic components of his suit held in place. "Ow! So... 'magneter' is 'magnet', huh? Haha, whoops."

[Avenger Assembled]

Eira said something in fact several somethings in Swedish Ryder didn't quite follow but that didn't sound very happy. One thing he could tell is that he was being pulled back with some force, hard enough that he'd been pulled off his feet - but the pressure didn't seem to be doing anymore than annoying Eira, nor did being stuck up against the wall upside down.

 

"I made that child cry." Her voice was shaking, no, staticky - like a radio operating through interference. "...I have little experience with small children." She was doing something down there, clicking her teeth?, that Ryder couldn't quite make out, and after a long hesitation said in that same staticky voice - "This may injure you - but it will get us free from this jävla magnet that should not have been stored near its power supply anyway. Would you rather wait for the adult, or would you rather get free on our own so we can save that child?" 

 

The security chief had not actually mentioned coming to their rescue - teenagers should have been able to get out of that, anyway. The security system seemed to be flickering again, probably from the interference Charlie was causing running through the walls - but Erin was reasonably sure he was in one of several offices on the opposite side of the hallway from where the teens were. 

[Gizmo]

“Hey, I didn’t map a dimensional rift onto my own biometric data because I wanted to put my pants on the safe way,” Ryder pointed out from where his helmeted face was stuck against Eira’s shin. ”Let’s find Charlie and you can make sure he’s okay and get better with kids! They’re really just like older people except they don’t bother to hide it when you upset them. Oh, and if you have to break one of my arms could you aim for the left one? I’m trying to sort of spread it out, y’know?” He made a thumbs up though from where he was trapped he wasn’t sure if the other teenager could actually see it.

[Avenger Assembled]

"You did what-" 

 

There was a distinct whump sound from the magnet behind them - and suddenly the two teens went flying across the room like they'd been shot from a cannon! The solidly-built HAX walls didn't break when they hit but there was definitely a hard, breath-stealing whump at the moment of impact across the room, a vibration hard enough to knock plastic boxes off the shelves and send their contents spilling out onto the floor. (All in all, it was a very good thing Ryder had been wearing his armor; where he had indeed taken the impact along his left arm.)

 

Behind Ryder, Eira was slower to recover, pulling herself into a sitting position, then cocking her head back and forth as if resetting internal components. Her hair was a wild mess, at least until she exhaled upwards to blow it out of her eyes and ran her fingers through it, casually sculpting her original do back into place. Slowly, methodically, she pulled herself back to her feet, looking a little battered but not much the worse for wear.

 

"My internal fluids are magnetohydrodynamic," she offered as she dabbed at her face with a rag from her pocket. "I hate magnets." She spat into the rag and looked at a dark blue fluid within, looking more annoyed than alarmed. 

[Electra]

The door opened again as the two teens sorted themselves out. Erin Hunter-White, in the flesh this time, entered with Mia in tow and the ball rolling behind them. "Are you two all right?" she asked, her face entirely sober in the way of someone who is firmly tucking away laughter. "Don't worry about the boxes. The maintenance team will be down in a few minutes anyway, they can clean that up. Did you see which way Charlie went?" 

[Gizmo]

"Haha, that wasn't even my worst wipeout today, we're all good!" Chitin insisted, bounding to his feet then wobbling for a moment while he found his balance again. "Thanks for watching the other lab for us, Mia! Good job!" The armoured teenager pounded a fist into his chest twice then thrust it forward in an enthusiastic thumbs up; even without seeing his face it wasn't hard to guess who was behind the insectile eye pieces.

 

He gestured over his shoulder to one of the walls. "Charlie ran that way when he thought he was going to get in trouble. Lemme see what I can see!" The soft glow behind those multifaceted ovals switched from an off-white to a sky blue. The view in Ryder's HUD was overlaid with information from outside the normal visual spectrum, including heat left by the recent presence of warm bodies. Simultaneously he asked over his built-in radio, "Hey, Yellow! Any sign?"

[Avenger Assembled]

Mia smiled back at Ryder and said with great feeling and a slight lisp - "I am a superhero. You are a bugman!" It didn't sound like an insult, not with that big smile. She was a smart kid,  staying back as the adults (well, the adult and the teens talked) and drinking in the scene with big curious eyes when she wasn't occasionally patting the ball next to her.  Yellow's chirping reply pointed Ryder in the same direction as Erin's sensors. Charlie wasn't too far, hiding on one of several possible offices just down the hall. Eira glanced back at the lab they were leaving behind with blue eyes marked by bright blue vessels, but didn't retreat as they headed down to look for the frightened child. 

 

Fortunately HAX was not designed to be a particularly confusing place, unfortunately it was the sort of place where offices were built both securely and privately - assuming you weren't a five-year-old who could run through walls. They finally found the boy sitting on a pile of books on a desk in the middle of a programmer's office, the screen flashing quickly with characters none of them recognized, Charlie's eyes red with tears and his hands over his mouth as the door creaked open. When he saw them coming, he dropped down behind the desk and called "I sorry! I didn't mean to hurt anyone!" 

 

 

[Electra]

The security chief sighed and relaxed into what was obviously a deliberately nonthreatening posture, shoulders rounded and arms relaxed, the smile on her face wry but present. "We know you didn't, Charlie," she assured him. "Nobody got hurt, and nothing got broken that we can't fix. But I still need you to remember the rule about going through walls, okay? It's very, very important." She looked over at the computer, then at the teens. "Huh. Don't suppose either of you know why it's doing that?" 

[Gizmo]

Chitin skirted around the room's edge and crouched down once he had a clear look at Charlie's hiding place. "Hey bud! Don't forget this is a science lab and you know what science is all about? Making mistakes and learning from them! So, I mean, you're already basically a scientist. Right, Eira?" The armoured teen cocked his head meaningfully in the her direction, body language conveying the broad grin behind his helmet. In a conspiratorial whisper he added, "Plus that was a pretty good trick. Whenever I try to walk through walls I just smush my face!"

 

Standing back up he turned over the top book in the pile on the desk and looked across the equipment connected to the terminal. "Oh, it's set up for turning books into documents. Like, digital one, I mean. Obviously." He flipped through a few pages. "Ha, this is a bunch of goofy medieval pictures of insects, weird! Like if the artist had never actually seen a grasshopper and was trying to fill in the blanks from a really bad description." He turned the book around with the pages open to show Eira and Mrs. Hunter-White. "Look at the face this one is making!"

[Avenger Assembled]

"The boy's passage has electromagnetic effects," commented Eira softly, "perhaps he passed through the hard drive and triggered something in the machine." She didn't quite make eye contact with Charlie as he peered at Erin, his sobs coming to an end. He didn't look convinced entirely, though, until he actually smiled at Chitin. 

 

"Bug-man!" He gave Chitin a firm smack (for a kid, anyway) with an all-too-solid helmet. "Bugs like juice!" Eira glanced a few times at the kid, and seemed to relax herself once it was clear that Charlie was safe in hand. She crossed her arms as she studied the pictures held up by Chitin, eyes seeming to unfocus for a second or two. 

 

"I cannot read the language," Eira admitted. "But the image matches demons from the Christian Bible, foretold to arise during the apocalypse at the end of the world." She hmmphed and added with great authority, "People prefer to believe that demons are attractive - but they are primarily inhuman monsters." She eyed the computer displaying the symbols, then extended her hand to interface with it. 

[Electra]

"Some demons are actually very- never mind," the security chief put in, her pale cheeks coloring slightly. She reached out to intercept Eira's hand before she could connect with the screen. "Hang on, Eira, this is probably something to let the professionals handle. First rule of superscience, if you don't know what it is, don't hook your brain up to it." From the look on Ms. Hunter-White's face, this was a voice of experience talking. She raised her phone and pressed an intercom button. "Hey boss, Charlie's under control and doing fine, but he borked a computer in a weird way. You wanna come take a look?" 

[Fox]

Mara was still in a lab coat when she entered the room, having left the project upstairs in Miss Americana's admittedly-capable hands; between that and her slacks she just about looked like she belonged at the head of a technology company. The illusion of authority might have been enhanced by a concerned-but-grumpy expression...but she pretty much always wore that, and it rarely seemed to help under better circumstances.

 

She took a moment to scan the room, popping an eyebrow at Ryder in his suit but deciding it wasn't time to ask. This all smelled like trouble. "....okay. Erin, can you call Jacob and have him air-gap the network? Take us off the internet? Should still be in the data lab. Probably nothing, but if this spreads, don't want it leaving the building, don't want anyone hitting us while we're down. Now what're you...."

 

She grumbled, pushing some books aside to make more room for the keyboard as she sat down and started poking at the computer. Mara typed fast - very very fast - but it still felt like trying to move uphill when she had to use her actual hands. "....like a stone-age...." That part might have been out loud. She probably shouldn't do that. Neither should this computer.

 

When she sat back it was with an expression of immense dissatisfaction. "....it's running a program. It's a running program. That," she clarified, gesturing vaguely at the screen, "isn't in our software. That is software. It's running that, as native code, on an OS that shouldn't recognize it as native code, to do some kind of...sim? Simulation?" She glanced up at the others, eyebrow high and frown low. "I don't like it. Where'd it come from?"

[Gizmo]

Chitin had edged closer while Mara worked, trying to get a look at how she was going about her investigation but reflexively skidded back a step when she looked up. His helmeted head turned from the monitor to the open book still in his hand and back again before meeting her consternated expression. "Oh, uh, it was probably scanning this book of old-timey giant grasshopper people-face devil pictures? This one is sort of a metal scorpion with teeth?" He flipped through a few pages to check for anything that might better explain the situation. "That probably shouldn't have compiled an app, though. You don't just magically get a thing to happen by reading a book. Unless it's like a magic spell book, I guess. And if digitizing counts as reading. Oh. Oh!" He abruptly slammed the book shut and held it at arm's length. "That's not a thing, right?! That shouldn't be a thing!"

[Avenger Assembled]

Eira began cracking her knuckles with a noticeable crack-crack-crack sound, her blue eyes slightly unfocused as she seemed to peer right through the text. From the look on her face at the time, she had not appreciated being waved off the interface by Erin, but with the arrival of Dragonfly had become all business. "Pure machines are incapable of doing magic," she said  - with some authority. "They lack the spiritual essence that makes it possible." She didn't seem particularly bothered by what she was saying; a fact was simply a fact. "Nonethless," she added to Dragonfly, "I of course reduced my visual acuity to 20/200 whenever I saccaded in the direction of the text." She hmmed and added, "I propose we manually tell the system to render the simulation on the monitor, perhaps using one of the pre-loaded programs already in the core memory. That way we will be able to see what lies inside without interfacing directly." 

[Fox]

"'Pure' is a complicated concept," Mara advised, still frowning at the screen, "and magic is all about breaking rules. Still, probably right here - don't think mundane, commodity-part-built computers cast spells. Might be able to hold and sustain them? Not my area, really should get to know more magic types. Puppy," she added, glancing down at the little robot that had wandered in during their investigations, "note, please, low priority: look up trustworthy magic consultants. Do-magic types, not are-magic types."

 

Puppy's one great eye spun in place for a moment, and he chirped an affirmation. "Thank you, Puppy. And, yes, probably good to see what's going on. Not sure how sim's built without taking it apart, but it has bits -" - that was probably a joke, but who could tell - "- and if it's simulating something sensible it has to be representing that somewhere in one of those. Can cycle through them, tying them to the video card?" They keyboard clacked, Mara's fingers moving in apparent defiance of both talking and what she was actually paying attention to, head turning around to raise an eyebrow at the others. "Have to assume it'll represent nicely on the hardware, but it's already running strange code that shouldn't work. Willing to give it the benefit of the doubt there."

[Avenger Assembled]

The images gradually flickered to life - blocky, low-quality images that resembled a file shared on the Internet around the time Eira had been born. The first time, anyway. They portrayed scenes of carnage as the scorpion-tailed, human-headed locusts fell upon the human race with unholy cunning, terrible powers, and diabolical wickedness. It was probably a good thing that Charlie and Mia were entertaining themselves in the hallway with their security ball and not able to see this; even if the low quality of the actual images decidedly cut back on the horror. "That is a star wipe," said Eira accusingly as the image shifted to a six-pointed star falling to Earth and then opening a gateway to infernal realms. "It used a star wipe to show a star falling to Earth." Her disgust was palpable - more so than usual, anyway. 

 

Gradually the images on the screen shifted to show familiar scenes amid the apocalypse - a Freedom City overrun by demons, familiar-looking (albeit crudely drawn) figures beset by the creatures, and the like. With the low quality of the still, vaguely pen and ink images, it was a bit like watching a talented but emotionally disturbed child tell a creepy tale. 

 

"Is there something stinky in there?" Mia called from the hallway. "It smells very bad!" 

 

"Perhaps we can move them to a different system," Eira hazarded, her voice doubtful. "One without sensitive data?" On closer inspection, some of these demon-bugs looked familiar to Erin - it was hard to tell given the low quality of the images, but she was reasonably sure she'd encountered at least a few of these during the demonic invasion - and for that matter when she'd been the Horseman of War some years later. 

 

 

[Gizmo]

"Yikes." Chitin grimaced from behind his helmet. "Okay, no worries, though! I've got this, retro home computer aesthetic is totally my thing! Also, bugs, right?" Taking the computer's chunky mouse in his gloved hand the teenager navigated the presentation software's menu to select the limited pen tool. With measured strokes he drew a series of smiling stick figures in an erratic rainbow of colours, holding hands with each other. He positioned a lime green figure so that its hand appeared to be taking one of the demon's scorpion-like tails in a similar manner, while a bright purple figure had its crudely rendered arm linked with a insectile limb. After considering for a moment he added a series of arches overhead, creating a rainbow framing the cheerful group.

 

Switching to the text tool he added a large caption at the bottom of the screen: "LeT'S BE FRiENdS!" Turning around to face the group Chitin gave them a pair of thumbs up.

[Avenger Assembled]

The action on the screen stopped abruptly - so immediately that if not for the ticking of the system's clock and the sudden sound of an exhaust fan coming on from inside the drive, it might have appeared to have frozen altogether. But then a variety of things happened - the first being a snap from the system's internal camera. 

 

A new bar of text appeared in the top of the screen, picked out in cartoonish red, flaming letters: 

ARE YOU GODS?  

 

Meanwhile, the slide shifted forward to an image of two of the demon-locusts, both of whom seemed to buzz out of the frame down to the text on the bottom part of the bar. Fixing their human eyes upward, they fastened their teeth onto the R in Ryder's message and began to tear it to pieces, waving their limbs in a way that would surely have been terrifying if they'd been full-sized abominations and not little animations the size of a quarters. When the deed was done, they perched proudly on their work  for a moment before a new slide appeared; clearly a photograph of Ryder from the computer's built-in webcam. 

The locusts started eating that too; looking like nothing more than hungry, misshapen grasshoppers gobbling up a still picture dropped in the middle of a cornfield as they tore up Ryder's image with great relish.