Westbrook Academy for Metahumans: Forums

Brooklyn docked her remaining undamaged drone and waited for the computer to analyze the other. Soon a few diagrams popped into her vision highlighting for the most part the obviously damaged components. Left arm substructure, two superservo anchor points were sheered off and the gyroscope had inexplicably failed. Vanguard Research was already aware of the damage they were merely not aware of how it occurred. Intuition had listened to Brooklyn and left out the cause of damage from the report. The bad news was that both her usable drones were being recalled back to Arizona to have their gyroscopes examined. They had the black box and knew that sudden acceleration and abrupt stop, free fall to a second abrupt stop had simply dislodged a controller wire from the mechanism. How this happened was far less a concern then why the one hundred and eight mile an hour impact disabled such a key part of the machine when it was designed to withstand dramatic G-force deceleration that would make this episode no more damaging then coming to a slow halt in the family station wagon.

In the meantime Brooklyn was not going anywhere. She could still attend classes with the schools videoconferencing system and read her digital text books and surf the net. All these things could not fill the gap the drones did. She felt apart from the other students, the distance became real again. Intuition could tell that she was a bit miffed over them taking both at the same time. Why couldn't they have just left her one.. or better yet transferred the heavy hitter drone over for temporary use.. she laughed a bit imagining the very large robot crammed into a students chair blocking half the classes view of the light board.

She would just have to hope that some of the other students might stop by and say hello to her in person.. maybe then this dolphin rumor would be squashed.

Past all the fighting, fear, and fallout, Roach had been busy.

His time in isolation had not been well spent. Instead of trying to do his homework, he instead opted to toss a ball against the wall until he was eventually released to help the students... which they rewarded by shoving him back into isolation until the teachers let him out in the morning.

So Roach had spent most of the morning speeding through his homework in hopes that maybe he could count on intelligence and luck to get him at least an 'A' for effort and a 'C' for academic scoring. Following that was dodging any suspicions the teachers might have towards him, find Alice and folks to check up on them, and even chillax near the pool when an impromptu party kicked off.

All in all, a busy day. And yet, as Roach laid in bed staring up at the ceiling, something in his gut told him he had missed something. Oh, he knew what it was but he didn't feel motivated to actually swallow his pride and do it.

Brook's drone.

Roach would be the first to throw up his hands and tell everyone to bite him if they wanted to say it was his fault for the drone's demise. He would! The Lao had made him do it- Or he assumed- and if they were going to blame him for losing control than they could kiss his ass.

Yet... no one did. And in the place of defensible anger that would usually ground him in never thinking about apologizing to Brook... he actually felt sort of bad. Yeah, it hadn't been his fault but... still, he had heard the drone was sort of her only outlet.

So, that was why he had walked out of his room at two in the morning. That's why he had snuck through the halls and dodged the nurse. That's why he ended up in front of the isolation chamber that held the vat.

He wrinkled his nose, looking around, unsure how to do this. He had never tried to talk to the brain waves that came from here but she had to have some sort of listening hub or something, right?

So he held up his hand and flicked his fingers towards the Isolation Chamber. An invisible force passed through the glass, tinging lightly against the side of the vat before he spoke. "Ugh.. Bro-bot? You awake in there?"

Scratching the back of his neck, he looked around the empty hall for a moment before looking back towards the vat. "I just wanted to stop by and say I didn't mean to mess up the drone and shit. So, I don't need you tryin' to guilt me into feelin' bad. Cause it wasn't my fault. But, I just wanted to say it sucked that you lost your... ugh... toy."

He nodded, proud.

Roach Copeland. Master at apologies.

Brooklyn was not sleeping when Roach came down the hallway. One of her threads was open to the computer just outside and its web cam caught the motion of the street proud boy slinking along after curfew. She immediately dropped the connections to youtube, wikipedia, netflix, io9, and two digital schoolbooks.

She watched him stop and regard her room a moment and for a split second in the back of her head she felt like a freakshow. It passed before he raised his hand. She thought he was going to wave but then she felt the pings as his hand wrapped on the air. She couldn't help but flinch.

He got right to the point, he was sorry and from the look of him he wasn't the kind of person that readily admitted to it. All this before she could even say hello.

"I forgive you" she said plainly watching him through the darkened hatch window where she could see him but undoubtedly she was lost in a shadow. The speaker on the computer said her words after a millisecond of correcting the pitch. Since she breathed liquid her true voice sounded lower so Intuition made the proper algorithmic changes that would place her voice exactly as it would in the oxygen outside her tank.

"you had just enough control to hit me instead of Eli, I saw your focus change from him to me at the last moment, he surely would have been killed"

He rubbed the back of his neck after he spoke, silence following.

He grunted, rolled his shoulders, and began to turn when the voice broke through the nearby console. Yelping a little, he jumped, turned, and then tried to turn it into a little dance move to save face. He stopped about twenty seconds later, spinning as she ended her turn speaking.

"I..." he began only to pause. He hadn't really expected that. That straight out of the blue acceptance. Maybe it was his birthplace or just demeanor but Roach always assumed some confrontation would follow most conversation. So when faced with just full on acceptance... he just sort of froze up.

Rubbing the back of his neck once more, he finally just cleared his throat, nodding his head once towards the vat. "Yeah. Totes. I mean... I figured... Oh, the Lao died! Well, didn't die or nothin'. More like we drained it and it ran off. But ET is like 'it's gone for awhile'."

He flashes a grin towards the vat, giving it a thumbs up. "We totes have a possibility of it becomin' sequal though! So, that's somethin' to look forward too, yeah?!"

"sequels are never as good as the original, the loa will probably team up with a leprechaun and just make it silly"

she laughed just a bit as she watched him. "Maybe by then I will be walking around here in a fully armed super robot and just shoot missiles at it or something"

"Roach?" she said softly after the smallest pause a good indication that she wanted to be taken seriously for at least a moment. "Would you know if the loa sent.. an ally here? Even if it were just a kid that believed the loa could reward them if they caused us trouble? Could you see that.. in their minds?" She asked because it was the scenario that she'd been considering in the back of her head for all of ten seconds.. all the students finding out that the big bad loa was gone only to have something terrible happen when they all let their guard down.

She waited for him to speak now, wanted him to know that he was probably one of the only people on campus that could detect such a thing. She put her hand on the alloy window. Her face was close enough to it to see the tiny honeycomb of non conductive dampener embedded inside it. Her goal was not to alarm him but to put just the tiniest seed of the idea in his mind so that someday when he got a bad feeling about someones motives he wouldn't just dismiss it as trivial.

The school had an enemy and it was still out there.

Roach furrowed his eyebrows at that. The idea wasn't confusing as it was just troubling. And one that wasn't unfamiliar to him. When he first heard about the Loa at the school, it was one of the ideas he had tossed out to someone. Maybe Eli? Alice? He had asked if someone had maybe summoned this ghost here, but they had just said it was here because of Etieene.

So he had shut up about it.

Yet, here was Brook, sharing the same idea with him. He scratched at his jawline as he turned his back to the window, leaning against it as he mulled her words over in his head a bit.

The idea was sound if not a bit paranoid. Surely, the Lao had come for a reason - and the only reason for the Loa being here had been given as a guess: Cady and Etienne's flirtations. Maybe the other finally heard more and just never bothered Roach, but maybe not. Maybe the assumption that the Loa worked alone was something that would bite them in the ass someday.

He tossed a glance over his shoulder, shrugging a bit. "I don't know... I mean, you'd think if a person could leave a trail of bread crumbs for a Loa to follow, they'd know how to keep their thoughts to themselves. That's the thing with me." He looked back ahead of himself before going about cleaning at his nails. "I gotta really concentrate on someone to dig for those sorts of secrets. Mostly, I just pick up surface thoughts on accident. What, you wanna point someone out to me?"

He snorted, adding, "You think someone had the hots for Cady or somethin' so they hired a Lao hit man to whack ET?"

"I don't know about Et.. what I do know is a loa shows up to a place that has someone that knows what it is.. and can probably fight it" She paused letting that linger a bit. "their are two possible explanations for that thing coming here. It either came here by chance or it came here because of ET. What do you really think the chances are that a loa.. just showed up? You fought with it.. can you remember if it said anything? Who did it go after? what was out of place?" She realized she was bombarding him with questions about something he wanted to forget but this was not over yet.. maybe the first trial was.. but it wasn't finished there was no closure.

"I think Et has a lover or a rival or an enemy back home that wanted to see him fail, and that person supplied the loa with his location with whatever it needed.. hair.. probably from what Ive read.. I think it was sent here to make Et look bad to upset him shake him. Think about it.. a spirit that can posses people? Why did it go so /easy/ on us.. why did it not just kill someone? Wouldn't enough trouble make Et go back home.. to face his tormentor.. whoever it is."

"that loa had orders from someone I can almost guarantee it even if it was another loa. I don't think it was defeated I think it was called back to make it look like it was" She stopped talking abruptly.. she must sound crazy.. but she was trapped here.. thinking all day and all night unable to even go out and take a walk.. if that loa came back and attacked her here she would be as useful as a... cripple. For the first time in a long time she felt the tinge of helplessness and without a drone.. she had to control something to influence something out there.. on the other side of the wall. Poor Roach she thought to hearself.. what had he done to deserve her thoughts like this.

"and everyone is going to forget about it in a week and act like it never happened, some of the new kids that just came in at the end of it weren't even told.." she was just digging a deeper hole now.. he surely thinks shes gone a bit crazy.

She let her last outburst ring out of the computer speaker near Roach and she winced. Turning her back to the portal she let herself sink until she was on the bottom amongst her hoses and wires. This was as far away as she could get from anyone.

And Roach thought he had paranoid bouts.

He rubbed the back of his neck, staring at the vat as she continued to rant. And yes, he would call it that. Less conversation and more of a stream of consciousness which really showed Roach something about Brook. She was trapped in there and alone. Especially now without her drones.

It wasn't that Roach felt bad about that. I mean, it wasn't like it was his fault that her... thing... made her messed up. It's not like he controlled her powers and put them into overdrive or whatever. Heck, it wasn't like he was God that turned her into a half dolphin hybrid (as he had heard earlier in the Caf). Yet, Roach did- It was a weakness.

The speakers rang out, causing him to push back to cover his ears. Wincing in pain, he tossed a glance towards her, waiting for the whine to stop before he stepped forward. He waved his hands towards the vat, unsure if she could see him or not. "Yo, yo, yo! Stop and chillax, okay? You're freakin' yourself out for nothin'- Listen, I'll look into it. okay?"

He would look into it? How the hell did he expect to do that? Everyone and their mothers were looking to forget about this whole incident. Classes were about to start up and the councilor had already began tossing out mandatory 'chat' sessions to those who experienced the brunt of the attacks. And yet, he was here promising to rehash this again and ask around?

He cleared his throat again, rubbing at his brow. "I'll make sure to keep a node open, okay? Listen, you're just freakin' out cause it's a freaky situation. I know I was bein' a dick in the Caf a few nights ago and said the ghost might target you..." Ouch, he had said that. Really had a blast putting that into her head too. "But, I was just bein' a dick. You know if things got bad, you'd have a bunch of people out here makin' sure you'd get out."

He nodded his head, crossing his arms behind his back and stretching. "Hell, I don't even got that insurance here. But don't worry- I'll look into it. I'll ask around. You're probably just over thinkin' this but I dig. Ain't like I ain't thought the same thing, right? I'll check around, okay?"

"ok"

The speaker whispered. It was obvious that she felt embarrassed about the outburst.

"I didn't mean to turn it up that much.. sorry I was yelling. I think I'm going through drone withdrawal or.. something dumb like that" She heard her own voice and how dumb she sounded she muted a sigh making the speakers click click quietly out in the hallway.

Intuition watched and listened. It had already placed a high level request for drone time in the new M.V.A.S. network before Brooklyn had stopped yelling. It wanted her to be like she was before, happy and curious. Before this conversation was over it would have received the go-ahead to let her test her first weaponized drone. Would that be enough.. the novelty of it? Time would tell.

"if you come across anything.. let me know. I won't ever yell at you again.. please don't think I will and never stop by again.. I promise I'm not really a nutball I just play one on T.V." She tried to undo some of the damage.. the only way she could prove herself otherwise is if he didn't avoid her from now on.. she wouldn't blame him if he did.

Floating upward and twisting around to the mostly blacked out portal she looked out at him once before he left. For a moment she held the fantasy she could read his mind and that he did not think she was crazy.

"See you around Roach.. thanks for stopping by.

I appreciate it."

The broad was crazy.

So Roach gave he that 'winning' smile of his and a wave towards the vat as he just slowly stepped away. No quick movements, no nothing. Who knows what things she had control of around here. Maybe some sort of steel tentacle that could wrap around his neck.

That wasn't a fun thought.

"Brook, no problem. I sort of owe you for breakin' your drone so I'll look into it," he said as his mind questioned if he would. It wasn't like he hadn't started his own theories but... well... Crazy Brook was Crazy. "Just chillax. You got Roach on the case. I'm like Encyclopedia Brown but a bad ass streak."

And with that, he turned away, trying his best to walk as calmly as he could... which wasn't so much. He sort of half-walked, half-ran away from that scene. Whatever Brook was wondering, he had to wonder if it was just a development of the recent isolation, long-term isolation, or... even worse... she had a sense for these things and was actually right about everything.

Roach didn't shiver.

But he wouldn't have blamed himself if he did.