Anakin Solo (anakinsolo) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2015-01-25 15:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, anakin solo, gaige |
RP Log; Gaige & Anakin Solo
Who: Gaige & Anakin Solo
When: January 16 (backdated slightly)
Where: Gaige's Garage
What: One Gaige, Two Anakins, even if one is just there in Gaige's memory.
Rating: Mostly low, there's some language.
Status: COMPLETE.
Death Trap’s insides were as much a part of Gaige as her own blood vessels. His inner workings were all mapped inside her mind, something she could find her way around blind if she had to. And given some of the conditions on Pandora she had damn well near been. The programming was all detailed out with full blueprints in her arm, he was quite literally an extension of herself. Which meant carrying on a conversation while digging around in the inside of his chest wasn’t really the most difficult task she could put before herself. “SC, wrench.” she held out her hand and the spiderbot obediently went to work, chattering softly to DT who answered in his own modulated beeps. “Hey, I can add a please if I want to. You’re the one who volunteered for helper duty.” More chattering, a cluck of disapproval from pincers snapping together. Gaige threw a half hearted glare over at him and snatched the wrench away from the offered leg. “Yeah I know you only did it because Claptrap is better at front desk. Surprise Surprise people are touchy about a giant spider greeting them. I don’t get it either. Also thank you.” “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND OPEN!” Claptrap’s familiar voice resounded through the lab as he swung the door open. “Minion will see you now!” Gaige rolled her eyes and tossed the faulty part she was replacing over her shoulder. “Go be an asshole downstairs, Clap.” Looking up she smiled wide. “Oh hi Anakin Jr! You on shift today?” Anakin had yet to really get used to Claptrap, or for that matter Gaige herself. Seeking employment working for her had not been the most obvious of choices, but it had been relatively simple to demonstrate ability, and it certainly beat out brewing coffee, and he wasn't old enough to work someplace like Sam's, and she had a certain appeal, if one that occasionally made him feel off-centered. As did her greeting. She'd said he was overly sensitive to the topic of his grandfather. Anakin would have said not overly sensitive considering his brother had also gone all evil galactic dictator he apparently had good reason to worry about the possibility of the Dark Side in his genes, but complaining about the greeting would only add fuel to the flames, and it was a demon he had more or less dealt with long ago, even if the more practical aspects of it were still a daily challenge, so he shrugged a good natured shrug and offered her a Solo grin. "Yeah, for the next couple of hours." Anakin stepped over to get a better view of what she was working with before following up his answer with a question: "What do you want me working on?" “Fuck if I know.” Gaige offered which she knew was stunningly helpful. She knew the kid wasn’t here to work on cars. Granted the projects she had were infinitely cooler than what would be found in an ordinary garage. Which helped in the fact that not everything was strictly above the board here. But not in a way that attracted attention. Attention brought heat and while going down in a blaze of glory did sound awesome it wasn’t on the docket for the time being. Her attention turned back to DT’s insides as he grumbled at her. “Hey, I am not being rude.” she huffed as she prodded about inside. “We’ve a few downstairs Lucky’s working on if you want to help. Pretty standard fare, nothing too exciting. I’m doing bot maintenance. If you wanted to give Skull Cracker a once over I’m sure he’d be tickled to death.” Anakin couldn't help a brief chuckle at Gaige's response. One thing he had gotten used to, and honestly genuinely liked, is that she didn't seem to stand much on ceremony or what might be expected. She just was, and there was an honesty to it that was nice even as it was occasionally off-putting. The two possibly just about evened out. But the response gave him options to consider. He could go downstairs, or he could spend his time tinkering around with the bots and of the two - well, it was pretty easy to pick honestly. "I can do that," he said. "Anything specific that I'm looking for or just the general stuff?" Maintenance on droids he could more or less do in his sleep. He'd done it hundreds of times on Threepio, Artoo, Fiver, and other droids that had drifted in and out of his life in 17 years in a galaxy where droids were an important, even essential, part of it. Gaige's bots weren't exactly the same, but the basics were similar enough that he didn't feel overwhelmed by the prospect. There had only been one other refugee that Gaige had let anywhere near one of her bots and that had been one Anakin Skywalker. So far this kid had shown promise and she had read through the data DT had collected on him for their running database on all the tower residents. Which meant she knew he had a stunningly low chance of fucking SC up too much. Which was good, she was attached to the adorable giant spider. “His wiring’s touchy. But other than that it’s just standard upkeep. The day we can make self replicating droid parts like cells, man that’ll be amazing.” Pulling away from DT for a moment she clicked her tongue like calling a cat. SC skittered down the wall into reach. Plucking him off she flicked the little guy onto his back, setting him on the table gently. “Who’s the cutest giant spider? You are! Just the cutest.” Legs wiggled in the air. The adorable cuddly personality build she had altered him to was way better than his original blank recon default. "Yeah, we haven't figured that one out in our galaxy either," he raised his eyebrows at SC and Gaige, but there was a grin as he did so. The two things - spider bot and wiggling about like a small animal just wanting to be loved - seemed so incompatible, but it was exactly what Anakin had come to expect from Gaige. It was all right; it made him smile. He stepped over to SC and gave the bot a grin too. "Gonna check you out here, little guy. Make certain all your wiring's connected up and your bolts aren't rusted out. Good stuff, right?" He reached for a screwdriver, turning his attention mostly to the task in front of him. He really didn't want to mess up one of Gaige's bots, so he knew he ought to pay attention. But it was the sort of thing that had come naturally for him for almost as long as he could remember. Centerpoint station had made everyone else pay attention, but Anakin had known for a long time that other people, even other Jedi, weren't quite as able to understand mechanics as he was. He hadn't known until he came here, that his Grandfather had been so similar in that regard. And he'd worked here too… "So is this little guy from home? Or did you make him here?" Watching him for a moment, Gaige moved away and that was as close to approval as she could get with one of her babies. DT needed to be worked on though and if she was going to cut the apron strings she needed to do it now. The series of beeps from DT sounded very much like he was rolling his eyes, if he had eyes in the traditional human sense of them. “Oh hush you.” she picked up a screw driver and went back to work inside his chassis. “SC? No actually. Found him here. There were a bunch of them randomly about a year and a half ago. Creepy little spy bots. Most of them were destroyed. I reclaimed SC, added my own bits and bobs to him, and now he’s here.” She never had found out who had made the originals but she did have some theories. Not that it did her any good here really. “All his upgrades, the personality build, his defense systems, those are all mine. Mostly kept the chassis and surveillance tech and gutted everything else.” That wasn't exactly what Anakin had been expecting to hear, but it worked, and was an interesting piece of information to add to his background knowledge about the bot, this world, and Gaige herself. He removed the easiest panel access so that he could work more easily inside and began systematically working his way around each of the legs, checking for loose wires or connections that needed tightening, or even just general damage of some variety or another. It was amazing how easily the little moving parts could get cranky with each other. A leg wiggled at him, a friendly-ish wave before it settled into a position mostly out of the way and Anakin grinned. "The personality build is fun, it's good work. And definitely better than spy bot. Was it local tech?" Anakin peered at it trying to decide if it resembled things he had run across thus far in his own droid building quests. "Or were they a tesseract thing? Or who knows?" He glanced over with a shrug. "I mean, obviously Artoo and Fiver aren't the only droids who've come through the tesseract, but they seemed to know what to do with those." “Is it weird if I say both?” Gaige shrugged, moving a loose wire back into place. “Or rather my theory is that it’s a tesseract arrival who built them. I’ve theories on who but nothing concrete. And it doesn’t matter now cause they’d take him back over my dead body.” SC chattered happily in reply and Gaige laughed. Wires back in place Gaige pulled back and flexed her arm, the robotic one. DT watched her carefully as she went through the thoughts that brought the connection online. Simple commands to test. Lights inside blinked on in a row before all lighting up at once. “Excellent, I didn’t even have to take my arm off this time.” She smiled happily before setting about closing up the hatch. “He’s not Anakin’s build, if that’s what you’re asking. I did help build a droid for him but thing disappeared when he did. Not sure why.” She had put hard work in on that droid too. As far as she had been able to track it wasn’t still here on earth. Granted if someone had stolen it there wasn’t much she could have done. "No, doesn't sound weird at all. I mean, it's not like I've not been working on things, and obviously you work on things, and uh, my Grandfather did - and there's a few other people on the network I've run into who seem to know tech pretty well. So it doesn't surprise me someone might. Kinda creepy though if the original purpose was surveillance and there were a lot of them. Glad you've found a new home little guy," he spoke to the bot instead, and stopped on the fourth leg, carefully looking at it. "Hey, hold still, I don't want to move the wrong thing here." He reached for a pair of long nose pliers, sliding them in where he couldn't quite reach, his focus for a moment totally on the bot and the wires. It didn't feel quite right and for an instant he stared at it, for all intents and purposes listening for something that only he could hear. And in a way, that's exactly what he was doing -- waiting for the pieces to fall into place with the Force -- and "ah ha." The pliers pulled ever so gently and with an extra nudge in the Force things connected back as they should have. He pulled them out and gave the connection a second review and satisfied that it was as it should be he turned back to Gaige. "It wasn't exactly. It was more or less just - there's a lot of tech in this world, but not the same tech as home, and there's a lot that's missing here that we have at home, so it was more just getting a feel for things. But-" and he looked over at her. "I guess now that you mention it - I thought you said you did have project he'd been working on?" Gaige laughed and flexed her hand again. She might need to pop this open as well, one of her fingers was starting to feel stiff. The neurofeedback was weird to describe but it was there all the same and stiff fingers didn’t do anyone any good. “Well yeah, cause this place is basically stuck in the technological stoneage. I mean really I don’t know how people stand it. Even on backasswards Pandora we still had basic digistruct and droids. The ones they have here are mostly glorified mannequins.” But she knew her opinions on Earth’s tech was not exactly what he was after. Instead she made her way to her desk. Overtop there was a line of keys, each one haphazardly labeled in her own system. To anyone who didn’t know her brain it was chaos. And it was chaos, but chaos Gaige understood better than anything. She plucked a small bronze one off the wall and tossed it to him. “It’s to the locker on the far right back on the wall.” she explained. Crossing her arms she walked over towards it. “You know Anakin was something else. He’s one of the only people who didn’t automatically treat me like a freak here.” Gaige’s tone was matter of fact. She missed Anakin, more than she really wanted to admit out loud. “We didn’t always agree. He was still way too law and order at times. But we understood each other.” Anakin couldn't entirely disagree with her interpretation. He'd watched some of the videos and read and had been taking engineering and computer science for nearly a full semester now, and it was obvious that despite being not entirely dissimilar in other ways, this planet had a long way to go before catching up with his galaxy, and possibly even the rest of this one. It was unclear on that regard. He snorted lightly under his breath and finished the next of SC's legs, looking up in time to see a key being tossed his way. He caught it easily and stared at it in one hand, glancing back to the locker for a minute and then back at the key. After a second's hesitation he followed her over to the locker and listened. It was something Jedi were supposed to do, after all, and while he occasionally found her bewildering and baffling, he realized that his Grandfather might have had the right of it and perhaps Anakin Solo could learn a thing or two from Anakin Skywalker, or at least this girl's memory of Anakin Skywalker. It was a humbling realisation. "Gaige… thanks. And I'm sorry, if I've been - weird about it. It's just weird for me. But it's nice to know someone who knew him that way." Gaige snorted and tapped her hand against the locker, the clang of metal ringing throughout the room. “Well no shit. He went all crazy and power hungry in your world. Even I’d have shot him in the face. I’m not big on anyone controlling anyone you know. And the Anakin I knew understood that.” But she had also seen where he was slipping. Intentions were where people got messed up. Trying to do good, trying to do bad, either way they never fully worked out right. And Anakin Skywalker had paid the price for what happens when that got really messed up. Still her smile faded for a moment as she leaned up against the wall. “But he wasn’t like that when I knew him. He could be as much of an asshole as anyone but he was also really cool. He just wanted to help people. And then he went and fucked that to hell.” Anakin half laughed, and it caught in his throat a little because that blasted honesty, and it sounded way too much like the brother he knew much better than the grandfather he'd never known and they had both gone and fucked it to hell. And the worst part really was that it would have been easier in a lot of ways if his grandfather had always ever been a horrible person, and his brother had been the same, because then Anakin could have shrugged it off as just the way they were, rather than knowing they'd meant to help the galaxy and still kriffed it up so badly. His brother still seemed to be insisting that he had. "Yeah, he kinda did. It's -- quite a shadow to try to step out of. But, I'm sitting here realizing that the shadow wasn't always so large, or so dark. And it's a little weird to think about, but maybe good weird. Cause I don't know if I'm like him at all, I hope I'm not in some ways, but maybe it wouldn't be so bad if I was a little like him in others." He wrinkled up his nose. "It's just not easy is it? Even when you try to do good, it usually gets messed up. Hopefully not totally galaxy dictator-y power hungry kriffed, but - I've been there myself. I mean to help people, instead they get hurt. I don't know, sorry - philosophy. Probably not really your thing?" “Excuse you, I aced AP Philosophy.” Gaige laughed and shook her head. “You know it’s not power that’s the problem right? Power just... is. Anyone can have it, they can do anything they want with it. It’s the doing part that fucks people up. It’s the doing that fucked up Anakin.” Gaige waved her arms slightly, motioning at some ambiguous thing. She wasn’t really sure what. But she did know that power didn’t drive people mad. The Eridians had power but they used what was left to try and protect people from the vaults. Vault hunters had power and they used it to open vaults. Dictator assholes had power too. “The part that makes people go all mwahaha evil isn’t the power itself, it’s the need to use it to control other people. Just because you have power doesn’t mean it gives you the right to decide things for other people, right? Because when you assume it does, that’s when you end up trying to take over planets and blowing them up and shit.” "Sorry," Anakin apologized instantaneously. "I didn't mean-" he shook his head a smile on his face. "You pretty much consistently surprise me, let's go with that, and I'll try to start dumping my preconceived notions here so I can stop doing that." Anakin considered her words for a minute and eventually nodded. It made sense in a way. Jedi sought control, but the control was over yourself, your own body, your own emotions, the way that you chose to interact with others. The control wasn't intended to drastically alter other beings lives. And it was perhaps more complicated than that, mind control did somewhat alter another beings life, even if on a small scale, and Anakin realized he could run down a dozen rabbit holes from this point, but he couldn't entirely disagree with the premise, it was the specifics that challenged it. But then, the specifics always did. It was the most difficult thing he'd had to come to terms with ever since Sernpidal. Choices couldn't be strictly good or bad, they had consequences that spread out from them, and even if you intended good - bad could come from it. They were imperfect actions at best, no matter how well you intended them to be. But you really could only control your own actions - not the outcome of them. "As a Jedi we're taught control, but it's always supposed to be us we're controlling and in the end that's the only thing you really can. You can control what you do in a moment, but you can't always control the consequence of that thing - you can know what you think it will be, but it may have ripple effects you can't foresee down the road. Even Jedi can't foresee that." He was quiet for a moment. "So yeah, it's a good thing power isn't a problem, cause I don't think I'm getting rid of that anytime soon. You can't really turn it on and off. It's not that passive." “I mean you can keep having them. And I’ll just keep calling you an idiot.” Gaige smiled bright but there wasn’t any harm done. She was used to people thinking one thing about her and only one. She was the crazy girl that shot things, it didn’t matter that she had reasons why. Sure there was the whole killing people was crazy fun part but she had chosen this life for a reason. Freedom, true freedom, meant more than anything to her. This world with its rules and inequality, it was a special kind of hell after being used to Pandora. “You can’t control consequences and you can’t control other people. And that’s hard as hell for a lot of people to get a grasp on. And a lot of people with power can’t. Then they run into trouble and then people like me have to take them out. Usually for tons of cash. Which, to be fair, is pretty awesome.” She tapped the locker again. “But power isn’t the problem, it’s idiots that are the problem. And Anakin despite being one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known was a big fat idiot.” "You know, after all that, I'd really rather not be called an idiot, if it's all the same to you," Anakin said with a wry grin. He felt somewhat good natured about the entire thing considering she'd pretty much just called him an idiot, and then turned around and called his grandfather an idiot as well. But she'd agreed with him on at least part of it, even if it wasn't all of it. He still wasn't entirely certain what she meant by his grandfather being an idiot. And maybe power was more of an issue than Gaige seemed to be giving it credit for, or maybe it wasn't so much power, but just that power meant that when you did idiotic things - they had larger consequences. |