legionmissions | Out With the Old [modplot]

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Out With the Old [modplot]

Who| Everyone who signed up
What| The rescue of the NPC Legionnaires
Where| A movie studio in New New York
When| Takes place the same time as "Books of Magic"
Warnings/Notes| N/a

The studio where the Legionnaires are being held is swarming with supervillains. It's a trap, of course. But that doesn't mean they have to walk right into it. They have a plan, and now it's time to put it into action.

The Legion of Supervillains are expecting the non-native Legionnaires to be pushovers. They're about to discover just how crushingly, devastatingly wrong they are.

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"Thanks, sport, but this is a hologram," says the slightly-built blue and white woman he's protecting--who does in fact look remarkably unscathed for someone who was taking a hail of fire ten seconds ago. "The more they're focusing on it, the less they're focusing on anyone else."

Cortana looks the purple-armored figure up and down in a gesture that's purely for North's benefit; she's seeing through the studio cameras and the teams' omnicomms, not the hologram. While she does so, the Theta and the suit are on the receiving end of a ping with very high-level UNSC clearance as she hits their IFF for details. "Oh, hey, two of you in there. You must be Theta."

The coloration might have been North's first clue that maybe something was up, but on the other hand, the entire 'superheroes' situation has done a good job of paring his observations and discernment down to the safest bare minimum. He's about to answer that it's a good hologram, or that at least he's helping the illusion, anyway, when she looks him over from his parallel cover and at the same time pings his armor and that- that's quick. Quick enough that even at his current 'there are people here with actual super powers, assume very little' levels of functioning, he can't help a tickle of deja vu as she patters through the process and arrives at her absolutely correct conclusion. It's one of the rare times where he's taken slightly aback and Theta is the one who's tickling intrigue enough to overcome his usual wariness.

"I - yes. I am Theta." There's something happening he can't process, the fuzzy mental confusion of not being able to discern an input that you have no model for, only all the more incongruous because what's sparking on Theta's end feels a hell of a lot like recognition. Awe-tinged, fear and determination knotting it up like the stakes just jumped a mile straight up, but recognition nonetheless. The only clue he's got is pulsing in one corner of his HUD, letting him know that this is the Cortana that York was referring to. "Me and North are partners."

"Pleased to meet you," he contributes, because whatever's happening right here (more detail about Cortana available when he can look at it, when he's not focusing on the fact that they are still very much in the middle of an active combat zone), it never hurts to be polite. "Anything we can do to help, since you don't need the shield?"

"Hasn't quite put it together, has he? Are you going to tell him?" Cortana says directly to Theta, amused, the time it takes North to ask his question sufficient for a long AI colloquy, if the two are so inclined.

She's doing a good fifty other things while she chats: monitoring the rest of the Legionnaires, repelling amateurish attempts to dislodge her from the system, coordinating with Delta, protecting the civilian audience, treating Brainiac's injuries with another hologram, swapping data with her original self in the Chief's armor...it's nice to be in the field again. There's only so much mischief a girl can get up to on Legion World.

Existing in their time is . . . easy, Theta finds.

In the Project he never did this. He never minded, but it was always running his processes at full-speed and communicating at the relative crawl that North's brain moves in. Clicking over to doing everything at full capacity jolts him, but mostly with how easy it is. Even if it's scary at the same time, because he's never been officially allowed to talk with other AI, not even at brain-speed, and here in the world they were made for there's room for so much more. She's so much more, blurring out to the edges of the virtual horizons between them, and the parts of him originally built out of a human mind are trembling in a way he's trying hard to overcome. He knows that he's very small in comparison, just like he's always known in the deepest part of himself that he could be more, even more than he'd ever inferred from all the tactful allusions to his unique personality and need for handling.

She's been working with Delta. She is, if not a friend, at least friendly. That's a fact, matter how overwhelming she is to be in the presence of. And they need friendlies right now. North needs them, to get through the fight and out the other side safe. Even if he's small, he can help. That's what York and North always said about them.

"I don't wanna mess him up. He'll probably think a lot about it if I tell him right now." Brains have their limitations, and North's really, really good at what he does, but he's still a person. He can only think about so much at once, and part of Theta's job is to handle the other details and keep him working the best that he can. North with a new resource is going to go right to work thinking if he can't put that resource to work for him, that's just how he operates, and Theta doesn't have to run simulations or numbers to know how that could impact his current successful strategy. "I can tell him after. I hope he doesn't need it before then."

Edited (tmw you're rereading and you find the single redundancy that cannot be allowed to live and end up editing everything) 2017-02-13 00:24 (UTC)

Delta, she's used to. He makes sense. Calm, logical, that dry sense of humor so many AIs have. Yeah, he's a fragment, and a badly-created one at that. But she can see why it's not necessarily a mistake to field him.

An AI with a child's personality, though? Everything she learns about Freelancer lowers her opinion of the entire business...and it hadn't started any too high. How much does Theta second-guess his own analyses? Does he hold back from fear of embarrassment? How much of his partner's time is wasted reassuring him?

Well, no point worrying about it right now. She'll ask Delta for more details when they both have a nanosecond; she can feel his concentration centered around handling the video feeds and York's makeshift motion tracker, a part of her awareness monitoring where Delta's code brushes against her counterintrustion protocols through the line out she'd left him. If she distracts him now, she'll have to pick up the slack, and she's not exactly at loose ends herself. Theta does seem confident enough of his conclusion. She can elbow him out of the way if things get bad later.

"He's your partner." It's the verbal equivalent of a shrug. If North figures it out on his own and gets annoyed at Theta, she'll handle that as it happens. Her IFF does list her as an AI, after all.

"Pass him some tactical, will you?" Cortana hands over a package of info about the handful of hostiles, who are not really doing anything, not by AI standards. They have milliseconds before any of them finish anything at their painful organic speeds, though a blossom of ice crystals is starting to form around the one in the blue catsuit, rather pretty for all it's about to be hurled at them.

And then she's back on human time, North winding up his question at last, and that ballistic icicle shatters on his shield.

"How good are you with that thing?" She nods at his gun. "My range ends about two meters past this corner, because someone finally got a couple synapses firing and disabled the hard light projector...which that lot is currently guarding so no one can fix it."

"Good enough," he replies, half ego and half honesty, because what he has in his hands is far from his standard, preferred gear. But he's gotten off a few practice shots, enough to start rangefinding, and enough to know how much he'll be able to manage the second Theta translates over the tactical info and he just knows where the enemy combatants are, even beyond the basic information he can tug together from standard visual and thermals. He smiles, half to himself, reaching back to his hip to touch and confirm that he still has one of the stun grenades he'd grabbed on his way through the armory. "-not sure I'll need it, though."

Time to test an idea.

Around the corner, barrel up, two quick shots of the unfamiliar stun rounds, which don't hit but at least force a dodge back and give him some breathing room. Return fire he knows is coming, more shots to herd them back and he knows that Theta knows what's coming, but calls the play anyway.

"Going long, Theta, guide me in."

"Okay!" he calls back, in the familiar cadence of brain-and-ear-and-voice speed, counterpoint to the micro-adjustments to objective and aim as he guides the grenade so it rebounds off a wall and into the clustered mass of hostiles, times to the milisecond the now! that sets off North and his shield with just enough lead time for his nerves to jump to action. After the hesitance of even speaking to Cortana, it's quick and fearless and there's a firework burst of satisfaction when the flashbang goes off inside the closed bubble of the shield, rebounding and amplifying the force against the unlucky handful trapped inside.

"Ha!" Cortana's bark of laughter comes over the comms, sharp-edged and approving. "Not bad for the new guys."

Her hologram is standing right at the edge of the two-meter limit she'd indicated before, hands on hips. "Take a look at the projector, would you? I need to see if it's reparable."

Now that the defenders are down, the panel that's been ripped from the wall is obvious, as is the knife someone stuck in a cluster of wires leading into a device that is presumably the hard light projector.

"I can take a look, but I'm not exactly the tech expert," he warns, trotting over and taking in the damage at a glance. "-apparently, neither were these folks."

Theta overrides the HUD just enough to give a little ticker-scroll of Cortana's most important identification details under her name, piping up helpfully. "It's okay. She can see it too."

"Huh." AI. Full comms access. He wrestles the knife out, hopefully giving a more unobstructed view of the damage. He's unruffled by the revelation that Theta's giving access to his visuals - if anything, he's bemused and a little proud of him taking the initiative like that. "Well that makes this easier."

As long as nothing's on physical or metaphorical fire, Cortana solidly respects the International Dibs Protocol when it comes to human partners (if nothing else), so she accepts whatever limited feed Theta's providing without pushing for more.

"They missed the power main. That's almost a shame. It would have taken care of at least one of them." Generating physically tangible holograms pulls a lot of power, and having that trying to get to ground from a hand down through the soles of the feet is the sort of thing that leads to death certificates reading 'cardiac arrest secondary to electrocution.'

"Okay, steal the line out from the camera and swap it for the one they cut. The connectors are standardized." In North's HUD, if Theta chooses to pass it through, the proper cable and where to reconnect it is highlighted. It would take a sim trooper to screw it up.

"Just can't kill 'em ourselves, right?" North muses appreciatively, unhooking the segment of cable as directed, working to patch it in while Theta hums along in the background.

It's a learning process, feeling out what Cortana needs to do her job (less than he would have thought for basic operations, more than he would have thought for optimal functioning) and what he can let her hitch onto (a whole, whole lot more than he had ever realized), and fast as he picks up on it in human time, on AI time he's obviously still very much learning. But he's focused, multitasking between opening the incursion-locked elements to Cortana and watching the ground around them for any sign of a hostile stirring.

"Stupid RoE, but what're you gonna do?" Cortana says, and behind the two of them, her hologram shrugs. "The civilians around here think war is something that happens to other people."

In digital space, Cortana's not quite all out, but she's working hard, her demeanor not nearly so relaxed as her hologram's, and her personal presence flickers in and out of Theta's awareness as she re-prioritizes her attention from nanosecond to nanosecond across all her ongoing tasks. It's going to take North something on the order of seconds, maybe minutes to finish the repairs, and she has things to do besides wait around for humans. Her connection to the armor never wavers, but from moment to moment it could be Cortana herself, or merely one of her dumb subroutines quietly passing data back and forth. The overall impression is of someone fully capable of kicking in Theta's door, but who simply isn't bothering...or, more charitably, of a busy supervisor only occasionally checking in.

Between being surrounded by stunned enemies and having Cortana flitting in and out of his processes, Theta's working harder than he ever has while not taking active fire, and he almost misses the shape at their eight o'clock that shifts, groggily lifting its head and-

"North!"

"Got it." Rifle dropped from tucked under his arm to his hand, and he lazily puts two stun rounds between the shoulders at point blank range, scanning the rest and putting one more in the side of another who chooses a particularly poor time to groan. Then he's back to the panel, murmuring to Theta in the tense quiet of working as quickly as he can through the unfamiliar routine of swapping out wires. "So is Cortana patched in to my armor now?"

"Is that okay?" He has an idea of how little North actually understands what Cortana is, so even when he smiles and shakes his head, he frets.

"It's fine, Theta. You're doing great, but I'll take all the help I can get right now." He hooks up the last connector and gives it a scan, watching the play-along on his HUD blink green in approval. "How's that?"

"Let's find out." Simultaneously to human senses, one Cortana disappears and another pops into existence at North's side, though this one is lower resolution, looking much more like a standard insubstantial hologram than the other construct had. "Pipe's a bit narrow," she says, inspecting her hands critically. "Oh well, no harm to anything but my vanity."

As Cortana's speaking, more hard light forms are appearing around them, simple white ones with no fancy detailing, and in short order, everyone North took down is thoroughly and professionally restrained. Depending on their powers, it might not hold them for long when they wake up, but at least she'll know instantly from the feedback of the holograms being destroyed.

"Damn, these things are useful," she says, looking down at the prisoners, or more specifically, their bonds. Being able to influence the physical world without cajoling a human into doing it is a new experience for her particular brand of AI, and she likes it.

"Thanks..." a brief pause only Theta will notice as Cortana checks something with Delta "...Hardball. You too, Theta."

Just like that, everyone's pinned down. A few swapped cables into a projector and the have control over this corridor, and North can't imagine what kind of idiot he'd have to be to not see the advantage in that.

"Any time, Cortana." He lifts his hands in a lazy salute, picking his way back the way he came. He has a perimeter to keep prowling.

"I'll leave our comms channel open in case we can help again!" Maybe not the most probable, but it's possible, he and North already helped Cortana once and maybe they're get to work with her again.

"See you back at base?"

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Out With the Old [modplot]

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AI colloquy you say

humans are so slow

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