2018-10-14: Within ARMs' Reach

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  • Log: Within ARMs' Reach
  • Cast: Shalune Amira, Josephine Lovelace
  • Where: Kislev-Aveh Front
  • Date: October 14th 2018
  • Summary: Once again, Josie asks for Shalune's input on a matter of machinery -- specifically, Gryndille's arm. Shalune, too, has her own concerns.

<Pose Tracker> Shalune Amira has posed.

    "Ah, Miss Josie?" Even now, Shalune can't quite drop the habit of the 'Miss' - it seems to be reflexive, and though she does try to drop it whenever she's asked, it just seems to come back like clockwork after a couple of days. Or a couple of hours. At least the mechanic seems to mean well by it, grinning pleasantly as she pokes her head into the bay that Josephine's been working in. "You said you wanted to say hi?"

    Slipping through the door, the pink-haired girl rubs at the mop on top of her head for a moment, squinting faintly. "Um. Just to let you know, I was talking to Lunata about what she wanted in terms of guns and-- I mean, I'm an ARMsmith, sure, I've seen some really weird stuff, but I think she might be getting a little carried away. She was all 'three barrels! that rotate!' and I didn't really have the heart to tell her she sounded like me," she natters almost to herself, kind of nervous at Lunata's growing edge but unable to avoid the grin as she needles Lunata just a little.

    She smells of oil, clearly having just been helping out in the Yggdrasil engine bay, soaking up more and more knowledge around the ship's advanced machinery as if she were a sponge. "... I mean, if you can do it, cool, I'm just... I dunno," she has to admit eventually, shrugging one shoulder a little. She's still not really sure what to make of her friend's situations, Lunata and Jay both - what will help, what she can do - so instead she quietly files that question away for later and straightens up with a grin. "Anyway, um-- what didja need?"

<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.

    At some point, Josephine Lovelace should consolidate her belongings rather than leaving them scattered over a half-dozen locations. There's the workshop she's renting in Dazil, Old Petra, the Yggdrasil's bay, probably some safe deposit box in November City, an inn in Adlehyde (probably, since she'd left the stuff there before it was attacked the first time) and, of course, Vane on Lunar.
    After all, one of these days she's going to get stuck (again) somewhere (again) where her stuff isn't (again) and get really cross about it (again).

    But this is still a turn of events that has yet to occur.

    So, today marks a return to the Yggdrasil's bay -- an act that she's probably only gotten away with this long because of her connections to so many people.
    Then again, if there's someone who is probably an honorary land pirate, it's Josie.

    "Lunie! Hey, good to see you," Josie says, straightening from where she's been working on the floor.

    The object she's got here is rather big and awkward and not at all in the right shape for a bench.
    It looks like something's arm. If something really enormously big had an arm that ended in a very big gun.

    "So, what do you think--"

    She pauses, tilting her head to one side as she listens to Shalune speak.

    "Huh. Three rotating barrels? Guess I could do, but did you tell her aiming's rough with those? Besides, there's always the chainfire problem, but that depends on the ammo she's using, and-- right, there's always the Van Brockline seperator technique. Could try that." But the smile on her face remains slight, and lopsided at that.

    "...Construction's not what you're really worried about, is it?" She gestures towards a seat. "C'mon, sit down, kiddo. You worried about her?"

    She shrugs, then admits, "Not sure how much help I can be, but I can listen. And if you don't want to talk about it, that's fine too. Either way."

    She inclines a head towards the massive... thing on the floor. "Anyway. I called you in 'cause I thought you might want to give this a look. Honestly, I'm impressed Bart left it be while we were off on the moon..."

<Pose Tracker> Shalune Amira has posed.

    Shalune grins faintly as Josephine's mind begins to wander as hard as hers often does, taking a mechanical problem and running with it as hard as she can. The terms actually go right over Shalune's head, at least for the time being. She's never exactly had much in the way of traditional book-learning, having always been better at learning by practice rather than sitting down to study, but she can at least pick up enough in the way of context that she nods along, making a little mental note to look the terms up later.

    "Aw, well-- I mean, when am I not worried about her an' Jay lately?" Shalune looks a little sheepish as she scratches at her cheek. "Jay throws herself into danger, Lunie throws herself after Jay, I... can't really do a whole lot to stop them, y'know? I mean, they both feel stronger about this stuff than I do. I've just got a quiet sense of 'oh nooooo' that won't go away. Would be nice if we could just try to get Lunie un-cursed, but it's not like we've got the luxury of time or anythin', and that'd just make her more upset she can't sword anyone who hurts Jay."

    The words all come out in a rush; Shalune blinks at herself for a moment afterwards, then giggles lightly. "... I'm okay. Or, I mean, I will be. Even that much helped a bit. Anyway, um-- maybe just try to make sure she doesn't blow her own arm off when she shoots it, I guess? She's had to replace it once already."

    Stepping up to the arm, Shalune hums as she peeks around it, then kneels down to rap its knuckles against the outer shell. "This is-- the one Miss Lily was chasing, right?" she guesses, and frowns a little as she shuffles around it in a squat. "I should probably be able to figure out the composition easy enough, now that I've had a chance to tear a couple different golem arms apart. Honestly, it mostly comes down to 'is there weird fleshy bits or not' in the end. What were you lookin' for, exactly?"

<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.

    It's frankly one of the reasons they get along -- while Josie may have something more akin to formal training thanks to someone else once showing her the basics -- in the end, in this field at least, they've both learned more from doing rather than theory. Even her mentor had encouraged it, opting for a more hands-off route of tutorship.

    Though at her age she's still picked up some jargon and technical terms. Comes with the territory and correspondance with others with her particular hobby.

    "Heh. And I bet you throw yourself in alone with? --Nothing wrong with that! Besides, I get how you feel. I know I'm a wild one, but Tiger -- Lily -- leaves me gaping at times." Her smile turns mock-weary and she gazes towards the ceiling of the room as if to plead to the heavens to grant her some mercy.

    "Fengalon protect the foolish, and also us fools that rush after them. Heh..."

    She props herself atop a crate, swinging one leg up to cross over the other.

    "Though, getting her uncursed does sound like a good idea. Assuming you know how?"

    Because if not, well... perhaps it's better for Lunata to take life by the horns anyway.

    "Maybe we should chat about that sometime, when the world's not about to end. I hate to say it but I feel like my schedule's a little... packed at the moment."
    First things first, perhaps...?

    An assessing eye rests on Shalune. With her left hand on her chin, Josie appears to consider the younger girl for a moment or four. "...Hey, if you think you're okay, then you're okay," she says, shrugging as she again smiles in that off-kilter way. "I suppose we've all got stuff we want to get off our chest. Still, if there's anything you want to do -- anything that we've time for, I suppose -- you know where I'm usually at. Yeah?"

    Which brings them back around again to the matter of the large, large object resting on the floor.

    "Bingo. Gryndille's arm, or most of it. It's not a Golem, as much as I thought it might have been at first, but it's not a Gear, either. Some kind of ARM, itself."

    She smiles, a touch sardonic. "And just think, Lion's the one who beat me to breaking the thing apart. Anyway..."

    She hops up and prods at the arm with a booted foot. "What do you think? I'd planned to get around to messing with it at some point, but we might just have a more urgent need for firepower of this calibur, right? I wonder if I can convert this into something I can actually carry... or barring that, bolt onto a truck. See anything here you might use?"

    There's a lot of arm. It's quite big and extremely heavy. Some of the heavy lifting, so to speak, is complete vis-a-vis converting it into a firearm (the end of it already is one) but at the moment it's also outside the realm of 'things Josie could conceivably lift'.
    It's probably full of mechanical goodies besides that.

<Pose Tracker> Shalune Amira has posed.

    "... mmm... I dunno where I stand, honestly," Shalune admits as she scratches at her hair. "I mean-- I'd like to keep them safe, but I'm really not anywhere near as good at fightin' compared to them. Big Shal helps pick up the slack, and I've made enough inventions to just about keep up, but..." But she's never going to be a Guardian-of-Death powered berserker, nor an accoladed Crest Sorceror, and she's still kind of coming to terms with that in her own way.

    A pause, and she frowns, looking uncomfortable with the sour expression on her face. "I mean-- that's the thing, I guess. We just don't have the time. There's always something... especially right now. It'd be great if we had a few months to really plumb through Rujm el-Hiri, or make up with Ge Ramda, but Elru it is. I just hope they don't burn themselves out, is all. Literally, in Lunie's case."

    She sucks in a sharp breath - and abruptly claps her hands at her cheeks to shake herself out of the momentary gloom, using the motion as a chance to pump her fists and straighten her back a little. "I'll be okay," she repeats the mantra. "Maybe not all the time, maybe sometimes I'll need a bit to myself, but I'll be okay. I mean, I kinda think I might be the most grounded out of all three of us," she admits with a sheepish sort of grin. "Or at least, I'm the one that tries to take a break sometimes."

    She focuses back on the arm in front of her, only to be told it's an ARM; her eyebrows raise, and there's a momentary spark as she instinctively tries to attune to it before forcibly stopping herself. "... can you use it?" she blurts, and then clamps her mouth shut as she takes the question more seriously. "What I think is... I don't wanna imagine how big of a truck you'd need to cope with the recoil. Or at least, you'd haveta test it first. Gryndille was probably actin' as one big shock absorber, so you'd have to find something to replace that with."

    A pause. "... unless it didn't do recoil. Some ARMs don't, y'know? But you'd still have the problem of actually, um, pointing it places. Miniaturizing it-- I can't really say whether that'd work without copying some of the components. Fortunately, I'm real good at stealin' ideas," she adds with a light grin.

<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.

    "So that's it. Next to them, you don't think you're measuring up, huh?" Josie sighs out a breath, her expression for a moment more serious than it's been the entirity of this conversation to date. "Nah. I get you. Next to people with strange magical powers, mysterious pasts, and what-have-you, we're just people. Talented, wonderful people, don't get me wrong! But we're more or less normal people." She leans forwards, draping her bad arm across her lap.

    "My suggestion is, you focus on what you're good at. Don't think about what they're good at, or compare what you do to what they do. Just do your thing, Lunie, and to hell with the rest. Self-doubt doesn't suit you."

    That more serious expression maintains as Shalune continues to vent her frustrations. "...Yeah. It's like that. Stuff just keeps happening. It might just be that you'll have to make time for it... maybe now, maybe down the line if she can keep it together. I think we're probably towards the end of the line with this latest, one way or another, but..."

    She shrugs. "Who knows?"

    To which, when Shalune affirms that she'll be okay -- says that she's likely the most grounded out of the three of them -- Josie's serious expression finally cracks and she barks out a brief laugh. "Ha! See, now there's the spirit. Sometimes that's the most powerful thing of all. Guardians know I've had to be the adult in the room more than once."
    And more than once, she has not, but who's counting?

    Which, speaking of:

    Her frankly outlandish desires for the extremely large gun in the room.

    "Well, it's broken off the rest of Gryndille, so probably, technically speaking, no."
    She pauses.
    "Heh. Yep. It's probably a pipe dream as it stands, yeah? Even I know that one. Still, with what we're going up against, it'd be nice to bring a really big gun to the table. Some of those Metal Demons sport some fierce armor, and who knows what that 'Mother' might have."

    Her gaze turns towards the door to the hangar proper, if briefly. "A Gear might be able to do it, but let's be realistic," she waves her injured arm here for emphasis, "it was enough of a chore using Weglaff with this in the way, and that was only temporary."

    She again prods at the ARM. "More likely, it's a better idea to take this thing apart, take a look at how it works, and see how to make something like it. Or just using these types of parts. You ever hear about a 'Gauss' gun?"

    Named of course for Henrik Gauss, the Drifter who excavated the ancient ARMs and managed to get the old mechanisms working again.
    Eventually, he'd mysteriously vanished, but the story lives on.

    "The idea of an electrical gun's a pretty interesting one, huh?"

<Pose Tracker> Shalune Amira has posed.

    Shalune looks almost dissatisfied as she tilts her head. "Umn... it's not that I don't think I'm measuring up, exactly. It's more like-- I'm not sure whether I can even do anything to help out in this situation other than hang on? Lunie's told me off for running from my problems before, but it's not like I know what else I can do other than cling to people, and that's not doin' too hot either right now. Blaaaagh," she sounds out abruptly, wobbling her head from side to side."

    That seems to satisfy her, at least, and so she repeats it again: "Blaaagh."

    She lets herself fall back from her squatting position, landing on her backside with her hands behind her head. "I guess the question would really be how you'd attune to it, and how you'd activate the firing mechanism. Most ruin-level ARMs I've seen usually have kinda weird ways of doing it, and I'm not sure how it'd work if a Gear was holding onto it. I mean-- I'm not really any kind of expert on attunin', I just guess based on what I've seen," she admits with another sheepish smile.

    Of course, at the prospect of taking something apart, she's all smiles. "A tear-down, though, that I'm on board with. You think Miss Lily might wanna watch? She kinda seems like she'd be into watching a bit of Gryndille get dissected." A little macabre for Shalune, perhaps, but there's a mischievous light in her eyes.

    It shifts to a curious one as she furrows her brow. "... mmm... maybe not by name..." she trails off, then perks up. "Oh! That was where you tried to line up the magnets, right? Jeez, I tried one of those once and the bullet shifted to the side and sheared the heck out of the firing cylinder. I dunno if I've got good enough tools to machine something that precise, but..."

<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.

    That expression of Josie's falters a little further. "Hmm..." Sighing out a breath, she shakes her head. "Missed that shot of big sisterly advice, huh? Well, we can't all hit the mark all the time," she says, shrugging her shoulders.

    "But if hanging on's the best you got... then that's what you got. You said it yourself," she says, shifting her weight to lean a bit forward. "You're the stable one. Maybe it's not the most glamorous thing, and maybe you don't feel like you're getting anywhere, but... at least you'll be where you want to be."

    She gives Shalune silently a look that might just ask, 'that is, by their side is where you want to be, right?'

    Sometimes kids need to work things out on their own.

    Another laugh escapes her when Shalune makes a noise that appears to sum up her feelings about her lot in life at the moment.
    "I should borrow that one, sometime."

    And then they're up and investigating the arm of an... ARM.

    "Yeah. As it stands, it was probably controlled by the rest of the machine, and that ain't here anymore." She gestures, towards the torn-off end. "So there's another problem for using it as-is. Still, a girl can dream."

    Dream dreams of really big guns, that is.

    Would Lily like to see that?
    That grin is met with Josie's own. "I daresay she would. Maybe we could make a little event out of it. It's not like I'm in a hurry. ...Well, more hurry than we already have, if we're heading east soon."

    And there's a nod. "That's the one! He did it by mucking around with something he found, so it's probably a miracle he didn't take his head off or nothing. Still, the principle's fairly sound. Power source, magnets, and the right parts..."
    It still won't entirely get to the level of 'anti-aircraft missile' that she seems to be dreaming of, but it's a step in the right (mass destruction) direction.

<Pose Tracker> Shalune Amira has posed.

    With a faint grin, Shalune tugs at her hair. "Aww... I appreciate it, I really do. I mean-- I've never exactly been very good at explaining how I'm feeling, you know? Thanks," she admits a little bashfully, rubbing at her hair. "I really mean that. I don't really vent all that often, y'know, I just sorta cling to them whenever I see them. And I do get what you're saying," she adds, with something more of a determined nod.

    "I mean, I've studied Hyadean an' Elw circuits at this point. If it's anything similar, maybe we can rig up some kind of bridge to something a bit more-- standard?" she guesses as she shifts around to fold her legs. "It's a heck of an outside chance, and you'd still have all the problems where firing it would probably send it crashin' back through the opposite wall, but we could at least try. If not--... mm. See what it used, I guess, an' go from there."

    She falls silent, putting some actual thought into the idea of a Gauss Gun and what it would entail. It takes her a little while to mull over the prospects, tugging gently at her hair as she rakes it carefully through her fingers, yelping every so often when she hits a tangle.

    "... what... would your payload be, I guess? Piercin' through armor's all well and good, but if your bullet needs to be aerodynamic to keep its speed, it might not be all that damaging. It'd be nice if you had somethin' explosive that could go 'pop', but chances are you'd detonate it in the barrel and turn the whole thing to scrap. Hmm..." she starts to doodle gently on her trusty pad of paper, but not in a focused way - more turning ideas over in her head.

<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.

    As if a little embarrassed herself, Josie waves a hand through the air. "Eh, don't worry about it, kiddo. I just can't stand seeing a girl bummed, right? ...But you'll work it out, one way or another." She gives Shalune a wink. And a thumbs-up. "Right?"

    Communication can be difficult.

    "Yeah. We can take a look at what's under the hood here and see what's different. I've only messed around with Seed City electricity once or twice--"

    This really seems to be a story that begs to be told, if only for the morbid curiosity angle... but perhaps not right now.

    "--so while I do know a thing or two, it's..." She gestures, vaguely, with her left hand. "Not my area of expertise."

    A nod follows. "Yep. It's possible it's too different and too difficult to get working in a reasonable matter. So-- I'll tell you what. We crack it open, and we see what it's got going on, and then see what we could do with it. Fair? I'm not about to hold you to something we might not be able to get off the ground. And we don't have the time to play with it the way I'd like."

    Which just leaves the final question as the usual one in these matters:
    What is she trying to do?

    "...Alternate ammunition, you mean? Hm. I've only ever used bullets, but I'm willing to give anything a try. We're likely to be up against some big old bastards, so something that'll maximize damage against the big guys... and still be reasonably possible to port around. Those are priority," Josie affirms, nodding. "Sad to say, but things like 'loading time' or 'accuracy' will have to take a hike. Probably, anyway."

    Still, she grins. "Who needs 'accurate' when you can just go for 'messy' to start with?"