The Demon Core [closed]

[captainbuzzkill]

Who| Dipper and Pidge
What| A duo mission gone haywire
Where| Planet Freep, the Second Galaxy
When| After Silent Horizon, before Books of Magic and Out With the Old
Warnings/Notes| N/a

The mission is simple. As part of the ongoing diplomatic missions to the Second Galaxy, they're to meet with the leaders of the planet Freep in a peaceful exchange of information about Freep's technology and what technology the UP can offer them, so that trade can be opened up between them.

Pidge is on the mission due to her technical expertise and Dipper's supposed to be some extra muscle in case things go south, to help Pidge hold out until backup can come from the Legion. Kid Quantum felt the mission was easy enough for it to be a good place for Dipper to dip his toes back in the water after his involuntary medical leave.

So far, it's been as easy as expected. The Freepians have very advanced computer technology and energy sources to share, and they're very pleased with the threshold gates and hard light holograms that the UP can offer.

There's not much that Dipper can do when it comes to all the tech stuff so he leans against a nearby wall with his arms crossed, as Pidge gets to work, smiling a little at her obvious enthusiasm.

...And trying to avoid seeming like he's staring because that'd come off totally weird and creepy. Doo dee doo, just minding his business, keeping an eye out for potential threats.

Comments

[isthisapidge]

Fortunately for Dipper, Pidge is just too absorbed in her work to notice him staring. She's no Hunk-level engineer, but having to learn alien technology on the fly is nothing new to her either. The hardest part has been adapting connectors and converting power regulators to avoid surges.

"So I think the only thing that may give you trouble is the inverted dampening matrix on the hard light holograms," she says to the assembled Freepian scientists, "but as long as it bypasses the coolant pressure regulators like we talked about it should be fine."

The sheer amount of alien technology Pidge has been allowed to crawl around since she discovered Voltron has been a dream come true for her and now she gets to add "alien nuclear reactor" to the list. She's been taking notes as fast as she can write. Earth can really use a lot of this when she finally gets back.

She takes her place at the main console and motions for Dipper to come over. "I think we're just about ready to fire it up!"

The scientists take their place on the consoles, monitoring and regulating levels and output, and a wave of affirmatives come through the air. The head scientist moves aside to let her do the honors, and she grips the handle firmly.

"Alright, we're going hot!"

She pulls the lever. A small whiiiir turns into a shaking hum throughout the building, the meters begin to click and-

Somewhere, from below, there is an ungodly BANG.

And in an instant it all goes dark. Pidge says the absolute last thing you want to hear from someone working on a power plant: "Uh-oh."

[captainbuzzkill]

In the dark, Dipper lets out a noise.

"Pfft." A pause. "Sorry."

(It was the timing, okay? It was funny.)

He walks away from the wall over to Pidge.

"What's going on? Did something short out? Can tech this advanced even short out?"

Whether this is just a normal "whoops, it can be fixed" or a "we really, really need to be worried" whoops is an important distinction.

[isthisapidge]

"Well, uh, either someone hit the SCRAM button ooooor something overloaded and exploded. Probably in the reactor."

Among the scientists scrambling to check connections and examine dials, the lead bounds up to them nervously.

"Uh, sorry! Very sorry! The readings we're getting are, uh, inconclusive," he dabs his brow with his sleeve, "There's something, uh, large in the reactor area but the computer, uh, can't tell what it is. It's jamming our camera signals. We need someone to go down and, uh, determine what it is..."

Pidge turns to Dipper and nods. That's their cue.

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper double-checks his transuit since...reactor. That probably means they'll be dealing with greater radiation. Seeing the green light on his transuit band that shows it's working just fine, he starts flying in the direction of the main access conduit.

"'Inconclusive.' Exactly the word you want to hear associated with problems in a nuclear reactor."

A pause.

"Nucleonic. Nucleophasic? Whatever made up science word they said that barely translated."

This has been a little over his head.

[isthisapidge]

"Nucleophasic, it's got to do with the way the atoms pass through each other before they react. To be honest, I had to study all night for this mission." She follows him, scanning as she goes. Never can be too careful.

"Well, OK, I wanted to study all night. But, yeah, anyway as far as potential for meltdown and radiation poisoning, it's basically the same."

She hesitates.

"Slightly worse, actually. Nothing the suits can't handle, but likely to irradiate half the planet if it goes. And, uh, then the rest of it if the radiation gets into the upper atmosphere." Does Legion have an evacuation team handy?

"So...No pressure?"

[captainbuzzkill]

"Naaah, no pressure at all. Nothing like the threat of nuclear apocalypse to get you all revved up for an exciting afternoon. Besides, we can probably fix it by just jamming a screwdriver in and jimmying something apart." A brief pause. "Okay, actually, that went a little dark. How about we pretend I didn't just make fun of a deadly criticality accident?"

He'd been doing so well so far, but he juuust had to stick his foot in his mouth.

Stop being so morbid. Morbid is not cute. Morbid is going to make her want to get a space restraining order against you.

Fortunately, they're almost almost to the core now.

[isthisapidge]

"It wasn't that dark." Largely because it may be true. Jury-rigging solutions to dangerous and expensive machinery is a time-honored tradition. If Pidge wasn't so busy running through the possibilities of what could go BANG in a nuclear reactor and worrying about each, she might have had more to say about it.

The core is close enough that they can now hear a more persistent something slamming around in there. It's not quite rhythmic enough to be a piece of machinery, and it seems to be moving around the reactor...

"I think someone's in there..."

[captainbuzzkill]

'It wasn't that dark' is exactly what he wants to hear -- and isn't expecting to. It's nice to not get the side-eye.

They reach the core and Dipper presses against the wall instead of just barging in. Barging in doesn't seem like a good idea when so much fragile tech and radiation is involved. He peers around the wall to see what's going on inside and...

"Thaaat can't be good," he says under his breath.

[legionnpcs]

A glowing man has one hand on a busted-open duct that he seems to be leaching radiation from, the subtle glow of his skin thrumming and increasing light output in a way that makes it obvious that he's absorbing the radiation somehow.

With the other hand, he's digging into a broken-open armored casing and pulling out pure lirithunium.

And eating it. Just crushing the blue glowing radioactive rocks in his teeth and swallowing them like he's crunching through hard candy.

[isthisapidge]

...Okay, this isn't quite what Pidge had in mind and she's not sure she has an answer for it. Mechanical problems are potentially catastrophic, but also potentially fixable. This? This is not what she had in mind.

Though she probably should have expected it.

She turns to Dipper and mouths 'be ready to fight' before breaking cover.

"Stop right there!" She shouts at the man(?), bayard at the ready.

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper jumps out, too, next to Pidge, telekinetic field shimmering around him.

"Seriously, man, that's just weird."

Like, yeah, okay, he's a radioactive villain, whatever, but eating radioactive waste or whatever that junk is, that's just strange.

[legionnpcs]

The villain laughs a high and hysterical laugh when he sees them both, dropping some of the glowing rocks.

"Oh, this is too rich. When I took this job, I didn't think I'd get a chance to waste some Legionnaires, especially this far from the UP."

He dusts his hands off.

"The name's Nuclon, by the way. Personally," he says genially, holding a glowing hand to his chest, "I feel like it's just a nice courtesy to let people know the name of the person that's about to boil their skin off."

[isthisapidge]

"Job?"

Yeah, that strikes Pidge as the most important word in that sentence. Though absolutely nothing about this is good!

"What job? Who hired you?!" A good time to break out her most intense voice. Hopefully he'll be too arrogant not to taunt them with that information.

[captainbuzzkill]

"You know who. The Big Man," says Nuclon, walking towards them. "Don't try to call for help, by the way. My powers are reeeeal handy for disrupting communications bands."

"We can take him," says Dipper to Pidge, dooming them all.

Fifteen minutes after jinxing them, Dipper lies at the bottom of the shaft they've been thrown in, trying to catch his breath after having the wind knocked out of him. The fight was a brutal one that trashed half of the arrays outside the main generator (luckily, all parts that just transferred power, nothing that kept the reactor stable).

He'd toyed with them. That was the most embarrassing part. The way he drew it out, not going right for knockout blows or getting them down so hard they couldn't get up. He wanted them to get up. He laughed every time they did and laughed every time he slammed them down again. It all brought them out here, among countless toxic waste shafts, used and unused. Luckily for them, the one he through them down was unused and the shielding around it meant they were blocked from the radiation of any of the filled shafts nearby.

Unluckily for them, he took their omnicoms, set up some kind of power nullification device above, outside where they can't reach it, and left them there in the near-dark.

The only lights they have are small red service lights that provide the barest of light, and their own small belt-clip flashlights.

"I jinxed it. Yep, that was aaall me. My bad."

Ten minutes, Nuclon'd said. It was all going critical in ten minutes.

[isthisapidge]

Pidge wasn't going to let it go down like this. The old proverb springs to mind: Fall down seven times and get up eight.

And in everything but physical stamina, Pidge found it very easy to get up after she was knocked down, again and again. Sure she'd love to believe that Nuclon's toying with them hadn't angered her, hadn't build up her head of steam, but Pidge was the sort of person who couldn't be dissuaded once she'd put her mind to something.

But now she was on the floor of a toxic waste shaft. She's been striped of most of her important equipment, save her Bayard. Her shoulder hurt like nobody's business and she's seeing spots.

And Nucleon is ten minutes away from exploding the whole facility, disintegrating them and irradiating the entire planet.

"I'm fine." She finds her way to her feet, somehow, trying to keep her dizzy swaying and slurring to a minimum. "I'll be fine. He didn't need any jinx to help him with that left hook, but-"

She registers that she should stop amending that sentence right there before she talks Dipper into a frenzy and herself out of the idea she's cooking up. The top of the silo is open, and she still has her bayard...

"Are you hurt?" She has no idea how Dipper's, but if he can't come with her then Nucleon won't find it worth it to come down and get him, right? The way she keeps looking up at the opening to the shaft should clue him in to the idea taking shape in her fevered brain...

[captainbuzzkill]

"I've fallen from higher."

That happens when you jump from over fifty feet up into the cockpit of a giant, dorky-looking robot.

"I already know what you're thinking, and let's go. If you can keep him distracted for like five seconds, I'll break the device so I can use my teke again."

It's the best they've got. He talks about it like it's not impossible, her keeping Nuclon busy even though he's demonstrated the ability to beat them both soundly. It's just a thing to try.

She's got her bayard, right? She can do it.

Medbay, Later On

[captainbuzzkill]

Fortunately, help comes fast. They're teleported by Gates to Freep's T-gate and brought through to Legion World within minutes.

A hazmat containment unit is waiting for them in the threshold hub. Technicians have already set up temporary screens and dividers for privacy and containment. They help clean them of any contamination and safely dispose of their transuits. Since Pidge's transuit had remained intact, only her transuit is deemed contaminated and taken for disposal. Her uniform scans as clear.

Dipper, on the other hand, gets everything taken away to be safely disposed of. Even though Pidge had patched his transuit, his uniform had gotten dusted with radioactive particles. They replace his clothes with patient scrub pants from Medbay, load him onto a hover stretcher, and quickly cart him down.

In Medbay, they treat them both on the main Medbay floor. Technicians scan Pidge and start treating her injuries from the fight with Nuclon, while Dr Gym'll and other technicians start attending to Dipper in the next bed over. Within seconds of scanning him, they start going into what's very obviously disaster mode, treating his condition as critical.

"How bad?" he asks, frowning at the weird gummy stuff that's been sprayed on the burns on his chest. It's bright blue.

He's a little more lucid now, thanks to some of the medication they've already given him.

"Can you tell how much I was hit with?"

"There's no way to be completely sure after the fact, but judging from the chromosomal damage, among other things, I'd say upwards of 1000 rads," says Dr Gym'll, waving a scanner at Dipper. "Probably within 1000 to 1100."

"Oh," Dipper says, his voice very squeaky. "Okay."

"So definitely within the treatable range."

Dipper throws an extra pillow at the doctor's face. "You could've maybe opened with that!"

"Sorry, kid. I keep forgetting how backwards the technology is where and when some of you are from," says Gym'll, picking up the pillow and putting it at the foot of Dipper's bed. "Anyway, we should have you back on your feet within a day or two, and you'll be mission-ready again in two or three days. No long-term cancer risk or problems with sterility, either. You also have a concussion and that should be fixed within the same timeframe."

Gym'll closes his little scanner.

"You're lucky, though," says Gym'll. "You said this was from only a minute or so of exposure, right? Another minute or two, and it would've been too much for even our technology to fix."

Some techs set up a bunch of IVs on a little hovering IV stand and attach the tubing to a cuff around Dipper's forearm, then set up a strange little hovering device over him that floats back and forth over his body, causing a blue light to radiate up and down it like the light from a photocopier.

"Both the gene treatments and the medication that's protecting your intestinal lining will make you pretty drowsy," says a nurse, "so don't be alarmed if you have trouble staying awake."

He places a little device on Dipper's temple.

"This neural inhibitor will block any pain and prevent nausea," he goes on to explain. "Let us know if you feel any bleed-through."

Dipper had been sitting up slightly on his elbows, tense over the news of his possible impending doom, but now he lets himself drop back into the bed with a little sigh that's half-relief, half-aggravation over being stuck in the Medbay yet again.

[isthisapidge]

Pidge didn't need even half the attention that Dipper did and so she herself barely paid attention to what they were doing to her. Does it hurt here, where did you get hit and how hard, any cuts, scrapes, places where the skin is broken, scans for radiation just in case...It's all precautionary, and Pidge's focus keeps drifting to the other side of the screen.

The words "1000 rads" drifts across the partition and she nearly has a heart attack on the spot. And then it's followed up by the word "treatable" and she unclenches. She's essentially given painkillers and told to call them in the morning, and let off the exam table.

She lets Gym'll go by before she peeks around the corner to look at him. He's hooked up to IVs and covered in salve, but he's alive.

"If we were on the Castle of Lions, you'd be suspended in a magical cryogenic healing pod right now," she smiles at him, "Funny how a future hospital seems less impressive in comparison."

Too much on her mind, too much adrenaline still in her body and somehow, it's easier to say that right now than to ask point-blank if he's OK.

[captainbuzzkill]

"They do have tanks full of healing goop here, so I just got lucky this time," he says.

He waves a hand vaguely.

"For a given value of 'lucky,' considering I need to get my entire DNA structure fixed. But at least they can do that without making take a bath in stuff that smells like cough syrup and feels like jello."

He does at least feel better. Already. The crisis is averted, he's not going to die, he's all medicated up and not in pain, and healing up apparently won't even take that long.

It could be way worse.

"You okay?" he asks. "You weren't hurt too bad, were you?"

They'd both gotten knocked around a fair bit.

[isthisapidge]

"I'm fine. They gave me a few painkillers and a temperature pack." She pulls up the leg of her uniform to show him the variable heating/cooling pad strapped to her ankle. "But, you know, I wasn't the one who got radiation poisoning. How are you feeling?"

She takes a place by the side of his bed. "You were kind of out of it near the end there."

[captainbuzzkill]

"Nothing hurts, and apparently I'm not going to have to be buried in a lead-lined coffin anytime soon, so..."

Wow, that went all morbid again.

"You totally saved my butt back there," he says gratefully. "If you hadn't gotten to me as fast as you did and patched my transuit, I would've been a goner. I didn't see all of it -- I was in and out while you were fighting him, but I saw some of it, and that was amazing."

[isthisapidge]

Pidge blushes a little bit, trying to play it off with a chuckle. "He made me mad, what can I say? I mean, when I saw what he did to you..."

Nnnnno, we're staying out of morbid right now. She's seen friends at the mercy of maniacs before, and it never stops sucking.

"Anyway, what about you? We both would be in those coffins if you hadn't made that incredible throw! I mean, I even had the odds calculator on my Omnicom working and making that was almost a million-to-one, even if you hadn't been poisoned! And concussioned! That was just incredible!"

[captainbuzzkill]

He'd blush himself, but his circulation is absolute crap at the moment, so his face just feels a little hot and gains a little color back.

"Eeh, that was like 99% luck," he says.

His eyelids are feeling heavier now. The look he gives her is soft and fuzzy, due to the drowsiness that's waging a winning battle against his brain.

And maybe it's a little soft and fuzzy due to other things.

"I'm really glad I was with you. I mean, if I was going to be stuck there with anybody, where it was just me and someone else having to fix something that big..."

There were very few other people he would've preferred at his side. Even some of their really powerful team members might not have been able to figure out how to shut down the core.

His fingers reach out to gently grasp hers. He's starting to drift off now, despite how hard he's trying to fight it. The wooziness causes him to be a little more honest than he might've been otherwise.

"Seriously, you're like the coolest person I've ever met," he says fuzzily, his eyes drifting closed. "And the bar is set pret-ty high there."

Between Wendy, and his sister, and Ford, and all their teammates...

[isthisapidge]

Pidge's lips curl into a cheeky little cat smile. "You better hope luck had nothing to do with it, in case you need to do it again."

He's drifting off, judging by the look on his face, but her mind is still going a mile a minute. She needs to give a formal report, she wants to see if she can get some readings on whatever Nuclon is made of, she needs to contact the reactor and make sure everything is still stable.

But then he says that and, well, she can push all those thoughts aside for just a minute.

"Me too...You know, we make a really great team." It took a while for Pidge to understand how important that really is and she can't know if Dipper realizes what that means coming from her, but when he reaches out for her hand, she lets him take it.

"I know, I know," she says with humor and warmth, "hope you remember that when you're not poisoned and medicated up to your eyeballs."

[captainbuzzkill]

"Eeeh, I won't need reminding. I thought you were cool already. This just means you're even cooler. So now you can rest on your laurels."

He smiles one last time and then his eyes finally flutter closed.

"Though, by all means, keep singlehandedly beating up...giant evil jerks in front of me in the future. It's fun to...to..." He's drifting off now. "To watch..."

And then he's out. Despite how dire his condition is, his expression is...almost content? There are worse things in life than falling asleep holding the hand of a really cool girl you like.