robothell | NERD QUEST

Who: Orion Pax and YOU. And probably Warpath, unfortunately.
Where: In the general direction of the Archive, and inside the Archive proper.
When: Sometime during the first day on planet. After Orion has an idea of who is around.
What: NERD QUEST. Orion Pax has been trying to ping a signal out of the communication arrays so that he can determine the location of THE ARCHIVE - aka nerd paradise, and basically his house. He is going around asking for people to join his party. Unfortunately, we will soon discover the downfalls of completely digital data.
Warnings: Nerd RAGE. Quix muncesting like a boss.

Orion Pax is no mechanic, but if there's one thing he knows about, it's communication arrays. It was his entire designation before he struck out into the world in pursuit of Megatronus's ideals. Even if he had never been intended as an engineer, his processor was quick and being able to do your own troubleshooting in an office job is invaluable.

He has in his hands what appears to be a cobbled together part of a communication array - not enough to even properly communicate with, but enough to send a signal. If this Cybertron is anything like his, all communications route through the the Archive - the grand library of Iacon and the repository of all Cybertronian history.

There are obvious uses to this. Maybe figuring out something about where they are. Maybe figuring out what happened. Along with all that though, there is a solid element of Orion trying to find some kind of emotional grounding in this scary new place.

He spend a few hours going around and telling just about anybody who will listen that he's doing this and asking if they would like to come along, either out of their own curiousity or to help protect him and any others that might be journeying.

After all, Orion Pax is no warrior.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Would you like to join the party?

In her quest to see how badly damaged the power grid was, Nautica had jammed her slight frame into an overhead conduit and was currently just a pair of gray and purple legs dangling perilously over the sidewalk, simply begging to kick someone in the face. It would be hard to do accidentally, however, since the duct she wedged into amplified her grumbling about the state of the city's infrastructure.

"No complete circuit? At all? There has got to be rust in all the junction boxes, I cannot even--"

Orion watches her legs swing around for a good fifteen seconds, trying to interpret her grumbling, before he finally speaks. He approaches her cautiously.

"Hello," he says. "I am..." Okay, actually he isn't sure if he would be able to hear him from there. He moves closer and - almost gets kicked. He pulls back. "...Can you hear me?"

"Hmm?" Nautica wasn't certain she'd heard something, so she checked her wrench, which confirmed there was someone standing outside. "Just a second!"

Her feet disappeared into the conduit, followed by the sound of metal scraping against metal as she maneuvered in the tight space. The impellers on her back had a tendency to catch on things, darn it. After some struggling, she'd rearranged herself sufficiently to stick her head out.

"Oh, hello--" Blink. "--Prime?" He was upside down, but she was still pretty sure that was Optimus. Probably. She thought. Oh well, no one not sporting a Decepticon badge was going to object to being mistaken for Optimus Prime, even if they'd question her eyesight.

If anything, that question just make him look abashed. His antenna shift back, and he shakes his head, though he does reach out a hand to shake - if she can reach from up there.

"Hardly," he says sheepishly. "Though I believe I may share one of his names. I am Orion Pax."

Oh, gosh! First Megatron, now Optimus! Why were the young versions of the faction leaders so adorable? She worked her right hand free, but since that was the one holding the wrench, it only led to further wriggling to produce her other hand so she could swap out the tool before accepting Orion's handshake.

"Nautica."

Orion smiles very faintly, finishing the handshake with a nod. The fact that she hasn't paused over the whole mistaking him for someone else thing lets him relax a little.

"Are you an engineer?" he asks, with a keen interest that might suggest he has an agenda.

Assuming Nautica will pick up on social cues. Rookie mistake.

"Sure am." She waggled the wrench around for emphasis. "Starship by trade, but the skills are transferable and cities get built with all kinds of redundancy factors so the stakes are a lot lower. Also they don't tend to blow up as much."

How hard could civil engineering be, right?

Edited 2015-01-08 05:18 (UTC)

That's useful. That's very, very useful. Orion still has his barely functioning ping machine in hand, and glanced down at it for a moment before leveling his sights on her again.

"Would you be willing to help me?" he asks, and hesitates for a long moment before lifting up his thing for her to see. "Have you just arrived here? Like everyone else?"

"Of course!" Nautica didn't ask what he needed help with before agreeing. He was basically Optimus so helping him couldn't possibly be a problem. "And yeah, I just got here."

Triggering her heads-up display, she magnified his gizmo so she could see it from where she was hanging out of the conduit. "Huh. What do you think is going to be listening?"

He diverts his optics off to the horizon. The wrecked surface of the planet is finally sinking in on an emotional level. Unlike most bots here, it isn't something Orion Pax is accustomed to.

"Perhaps no sentient life," he says, his spark feeling faint at the idea. "Though, we have only explored a small portion of the surface. Primarily, I am attempting to signal the Archive - at least on my Cybertron, all communications were routed through its databases. As such, any signals should be drawn in its direction. If tracked...at least we may find ourselves in possession of more information."

Neither was Nautica, but she competed at the galactic level in obliviousness. Besides, the Cybertron she knew was a blasted wasteland as well. At least this one was peaceful.

"A library, is it?" Nautica perked up even farther than her considerable baseline perkiness. Sounded like an excellent use of time to her. "Stand clear, I'm coming down."

Her head vanished back into the duct and another muted series of thumps and scraping noises ensued as she turned around to drop down feet-first. For a moment she dangled off the ground before letting go and falling the last yard or so. No one would ever accuse Nautica of being an athlete, but she landed standing and she was going to call that a success.

"Right, let's have a look." She held out her hand for Orion's little toy. Or perhaps not so little for her; Nautica wasn't a large mech.

If anything, Orion is unusually large for his class. Not as big as Optimus Prime, in either incarnation, but certainly on the upper side of average. He passes it to her, wondering how ridiculous it must look to someone who properly knows what they are doing with such things.

In reality, it's reasonably competent, but Orion Pax is one of his own biggest critics.

"It seems to be responding to something, at least," he says, carefully. "Though a stronger signal might help."

"Hmm, maybe," she said, flipping up the panel on her wrench to scan Orion's machine and watching the readout in silence as results started to come back. "The circuitry's all fine--not textbook, but clever use of salvaged components, good job there--I think we just need to tune the impedance more precisely. It'll boost the effective signal strength without requiring more power."

Not waiting for assent, she tucked the wrench under her arm and reached into the guts of the device with thumb and forefinger, HUD springing back into existence to magnify her workspace. "Just sloooowly tweak the resistance until we see some improv--ah, there we go. I don't know what it's finding, but it's sure finding something." Nautica smiled and offered Orion his gadget back.

Nerdvana has arrived.

NERD QUEST

ORION PAX ASKING GUYS

NERD QUEST \o/

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THE ARCHIVE