drive and purpose; [ spring catch-all ]

[anbaric]

WHO: Lord Asriel + you!
WHAT: Asriel has settled in and is getting to work.
WHEN: March + April.
WHERE: Gaze, Trenchwood, and wherever else!

CONTENT WARNINGS: Will be added in headers as needed! General warnings and opt-out is here!

Comments

[wrenchedup]

[ Wrench shrugged as he further entered the room; LED X's moved and blinked just enough to state that yes, indeed, those were suppose to be eyes. He casually looked around before his attention met Asriel. ]

It's cool, man. Wasn't a good joke anyway. Referenced some old movie about some non-religious person experiencing stigmata or some shit honestly I barely remember it. [ He laughed. ] Detecting something in particular, or anything at all?

[anbaric]

I'll take your word for it. Our moving pictures were mostly religious films or propaganda pieces, so they were hardly worth the time.

[ also, he calls them moving pictures. ]

It tells me what someone is — human or Sleeper, at least for now. The idea is to create more targeted effects when combined with others. I am researching different methods of keeping Pthumerian influence out, but this particular experiment requires a bit of each blood type, so I prefer to work out most of the bugs beforehand. Pthumerian blood is much harder to come by.

[ despite his claim to dislike lectures, asriel is happy to explain everything anyway. ]

Do those have a purpose, or are they purely for show?

[ he points to his eyes to indicate the LEDs. ]

It's a technology that's well above what my world was capable of in either case.

[wrenchedup]

[ Moving pictures. Okay, so that's what he's dealing with. God dammit. Marcus, please. Lend him your wisdom on everything Retr0. Wrench slowly nodded. ]

Gonna be hard to do given where you're currently situated, dude. Not opposed to it, though. Hell, making something happen right under their surveillance is kinda hilarious. What a great fuck you.

[ Wrench seems to be quite animated when he's speaking. Plenty of gesticulations. The mask changing expressions to suit the emotions he's trying to convey. When the question was dropped though there was a pause, a moment of awkwardness, a but of "oh, uhm. Uh" stuttering. It's funny, right? Cause you'd think people would ask him about it a lot but they don't. Most people, he figures, accepted that it was what it was. ]

It, uh. I— well, people don't really. [ A hand came to rub at the back of his neck for a moment. ] Ask me that. But I guess you could say it's kind of like. I dunno. [ God, does he want to share? Well, too late now he's being all fucking awkward and shit about it. Obviously its important so if this guy wanted to pinpoint his weakness for any reason, whether or not he knew why the mask was important, he knew it was. The joys of anxiety and catastrophic thinking. ] an assistive device, I guess?

[anbaric]

All the more reason to do it. Few things that yield real change come easily; if they did, we wouldn't have to fight for them.

[ spoken as the guy who finished one revolution and decided to try and start another as soon as he got here.

the sudden awkwardness is a curious turn — enough that he and stelmaria exchange a look — but it's not asriel's way to dig when it's something that seems too personal, which he's willing to bet this is. ]

As you say. I wondered if they might help you see in the dark or something to that effect.

[ which could easily fall under the umbrella of assistive device, if you think about it. ]

You'll find I have a habit of asking questions others don't, but my fight is with the Pthumerians.

[ so he's not a threat, at least to anyone who isn't one of Them. ]

[wrenchedup]

eh, its more like. [ he rolls his wrist a few times searching for the words. can't find any. shrugs. (the guy made a point though, he should work on infrared). anyway! oookay, welp. that happened, and now he's moving on! back on schedule. here we go. just another wrenchism. don't worry about it.

as for everything else? well. don't he know that feeling? then again, he's never been up against god-like beings before. just soulless corporations and political powers. in their own way they were just as much a god as any. more than capable of ruining the lives of many, and often did. ]

back home the eyes were easy to hide from if you knew how to do it. i'd be interested in knowing how they see. Is it our blood, is it our [ both the display shows quotes and he uses quotey' fingers ] energy, is it actually just their fucking eyes and they're simply omnipresent?

cause it's gonna take a lot more than some cloaking device that i could make and that's if [ he punctuated that with gesticulation ] nanotechnology even works the same way here. was talking to someone recently whose world wasn't even made up by fucking quarks and shit. i dunno. that's fucking insane to me.

anyway, asking questions people don't isn't a bad trait its just not something i get hit with often. crowd i run with operates on a don't ask don't tell kinda policy but like. in the 'about anything that could dox you' kinda way.

[anbaric]

[ well. that is a lot that just wrench just said, and asriel takes a few seconds longer to mull it over because those weren't all words he knew the meaning of right away. ]

I work under the assumption that the answer to that question is all of the above. I imagine Never Mind utilises the ravens for surveillance, for example, but I have no idea how the Doorway was affecting people it had never seen, so I assume it was blood magic. It means more effort finding solutions for both, but being thorough isn't a bad thing.

As for what the world is made of...— [ asriel can't resist. ] — did you have Dust in your world? We also knew them as Rusakov particles, which might also be meaningless to you. What else did they call them..?

[ while he appreciates the differences between worlds, sometimes he feels the language barrier, and it's frustrating. fortunately, stelmaria is always there to compensate for his failings. ]

Dark matter.

Right. Dark matter. It's a funny name for it, isn't it? [ and yet he calls it Dust. ] I ask because much of what I can tell you deals with it. I am not a magician; I deal in natural philosophies — science, as you say.

And yet I incorporate a lot of blood magic into my work like I used to working with Dust. Technology and magic pair in curious ways. Often an application of Darkblood can bridge a gap otherwise unsolvable by conventional measures. Some might call that cheating, but only if you're a traditionalist.

[ which he clearly is not. ]

[wrenchedup]

[ Mhm. He hummed in thought. More thorough was always the better option it was just a matter of actually being able to pull it off. Gaze gave him a constant feeling of being watched with or without anything or anyone present. By all means, though. Don't resist. To be honest, he talked pretty casually and didn't even stop to consider that maybe Asriel had different words or understanding of things.

Which was why it looked as though Wrench was processing things silently when Rusakov Particles was brought up, but Dark Matter. He let out an 'ahhh'. ] Oh, yeah. That's a branch of physics I'm less knowledgeable in. Actually, a lot of physics I'm not the strongest in, I'll admit. But yeah, yeah I'm familiar with dark matter.

[ He walked a bit as he talked. Helped him process, and also was a good cover for somewhat snooping eyes. ] Don't think our world figured out what the fuck to do with it yet or if anything could be done with it, but we've observed it and. [ Wrench stopped for a moment as if searching his mind for any articles of relevance. Yup. That's where that ended. ]

Eh, tradition. [ Wrench waved off. ] If you need, by the way, for me to explain what the hell I said let me know. My kind of more specialized area is in robotics. From more traditional robotics to biomechanics which works a lot with science that just does what it wants because it wants to. Man, you get into quantum shit and usually the answer is "I dunno, it just fucking does because it did" and you have to kind of accept that for what it is. [ He laughed. ]

Anyway. What I don't understand is how these things pair. Bloodmagic and technology. But I'd like to. Cause I kinda need to at this point. What is magic but a science that's not understood yet anyway, right? Some shit like that.

[anbaric]

Robotics?

[ here, there is a brief lapse because asriel's mind has immediately filled in many blanks about what that could all mean. sure, he could ask, but he's already off on another thought. ]

Hardly my area, but I would be very interested in seeing your work. We had nothing of the sort, but I've encountered some technology like that on my travels.

[ it had been evident when he'd developed many of his late-stage inventions, which were so unlike anything ever seen in his world that he could have only managed it by reverse engineering tech from other places. ]

Dust works on intention. Mind over matter in a literal sense. If you want a giant, wingless, metal spider to fly, it will fly. In this case, it works because I wanted it to. [ he remains immensely proud of this, but who wouldn't be in that situation? ] Darkblood aligns very neatly with what I was previously doing because it operates in almost the same way, but all the blood types have their uses.

Consider materials as one example. I imagine you could do much more than you would ordinarily if you had an alloy as durable as steel but much lighter and more flexible, yes?