| Terribly Wrong, Terribly Right |
| Summary: | Bannik, Cilusia, and Damon have a chat around in the Repair Bay about Cylons, jail time, masturbation… the usual stuff. |
| Date: | 6 Apr 2041 AE |
| Related Logs: | None |
| Players: |
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| Repair Bay - Hangar Deck - Battlestar Cerberus |
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| Post Holocaust Day: #39 |
| When engines need to be rebuilt or other heavy but short-term work needs to be done, this is where it happens. Large, red hand-mobile cranes are situated along the wall beside stacks of toolchests. Carts with various computers and electronics are dispersed around the area for quick access. A very conspicuous yellow locker at the rear holds a sizable amount of firefighting gear, as well. Sturdy metal stands are available to hold all sorts of parts from gun systems to the FTL drives of a Raptor. Big enough to accommodate quite a few Vipers and Raptors at once, this area see's extensive use and is usually attended by at least one crew at all hours of the day and night. |
| Condition Level: 3 - All Clear |
The repair bay is darker than usual. Damon, for some reason, has chosen to turn off half the lights in the bay and stands dramatically silhouetted against the front of the Heavy Raider - the 'face' of it, if one wished to look at it that way. One hand is hooked into his toolbelt, the other passing slowly over the hull of the Cylon craft. "What's your secret?" he murmurs to the ship, leaning his head closer as though the thing were about to answer him.
Ooooh, looky what we have here. It's a Damon. And he's all in the dark and broody! How…fun? It's the beginning of her shift, so where else would Cilusia be? With carefully placed steps, being as sneaky as she can (which is pretty easy given her size), she sneaks into the repair bay and gets up behind Damon. When the moment is right, i.e., once he asks the robotic craft his question, Cil slaps a hand on his shoulder. "You didn't say the magic word. That, and I think it needs to be plugged in first."
Damon being just about half-deaf probably helps. Given the right conditions and ambient noise, an elephant could sneak up on him pretty easily. The split second that Cilusia slaps her hand on his shoulder, he starts and pulls away, turning around with OMFG!face. Sneaking up on a guy just isn't fair after all the tension and creepiness of salvage operations on Parnassus Anchorage. At least he hasn't pissed himself. "If I'd had my hand on a wrench, you'd probably be unconscious right about now," he says, trying to recover. He sounds bemused.
"Well, I guess there's two things going for me then. First, you don't have a wrench. Second, you do know where I've been since you all set out before Warday, right?" While Damon sounds bemused, Cilusia looks bemused, smirking a little while she floats on over to the workbenches. The bits and pieces of armor she'd been working on the other day still sit there, but she pushes them aside to make room for her butt. Then, up she goes, with a little hop, planting her backside up on the workspace. "Regardless, I don't think it'd answer you, even if it was turned on or alive or whatever the frak you call a toaster."
Damon lifts a wrench just a couple inches where it sits snugly on his toolbelt just to disprove her - semantically, anyway. He didn't have a wrench in his hand. "Alive. Sentient. Sapient. Whatever you want to call it. Them." He raps his knuckle on the hull and steps away from the thing, turning toward Cilusia. Still, his touch lingers on the craft for a moment longer. "You were down in lockup, if I read correctly, yeah?" he asks. "Don't much matter to me either way. I've done time behind bars, and I know plenty other who have." He shrugs. "There's many who say you're not a real soldier until you've been in the Brig at least once."
"Well, I guess I'm a real soldier then huh? Twice over? Something like that. Depends on if it's cumulative or Boolean or what." Still on the bench, her booted feet dangle and swing lazily, since she's much too short to have them reach the ground. While chatting, she's pulling her hair back, per both the Chief's orders and common sense. She'd like to keep her scalp, kthnx. "So, what exactly are you trying to figure out about that tin can?"
"I think the value is 'Yes' after the first incarceration," Damon says with a grin. "But after the third, people start questioning your sanity." He sits down on a bench facing her after bringing up all the lights again. "I was only in there once myself, mind you. Not that it means my sanity shouldn't be doubted." A quick glance is given to the stuff she's been working on. "Anything and everything, really. I haven't gotten a chance to work with it much, so I'm more waitin' for the reports to start coming in before I try to figure anything out myself."
To Damon's words, Cilusia nods a little. "Yeah, I hear you there. No frakkin' way I'm going to put the electronic guts out of that creepy frakkin' thing. I throw a damn cloth over that face whenever I'm in here working, otherwise it feels like I'm being watched the whole time. Makes me shiver. Of course, maybe they did that on purpose." They being the Cylons, of course. "That, and I'm not half as good with electronics. And that's Colonial shit. I'd probably mangle Cylon gizmos beyond all recognition, and then what use are they?"
Damon glances back to the Heavy Raider. "Maybe they put on faces to humanize themselves," he muses aloud. "Machines don't need faces. Or even humanoid forms. All that does is anthropomorphize them." He's quiet and obviously thoughtful for a moment. "If they're just machines, then frakkin' around with their machinery is, what, surgery? So Bannik isn't just a mechanic when he's working on that thing, he's a Cylon-doctor." A chuckle rises at that thought. "Best to let him and the other techs handle it, anyway. I started on the mechanic side, too, and I know just barely enough technician shit to scrape by."
Once again, Cilusia nods along with what he says. "I hear you there." To demonstrate her next point, she pics up one of the pieces of armor and bangs it on the workbench a little. "That tech stuff is for the birds. Give me armor and flight suits and ejection seats and all that. Stuff's damn simple, but damn important. Tug a handle, blow some jets, out you go. Squeeze the legs, keep that blood in the head. Nothing even a quarter as complicated as what's in that bucket," she says, nodding toward the raider.
"Tug a handle, blow some jets, squeeze the legs… Frak, that sounds more like what happens when certain people close their curtains up in the bunks," Damon says dryly. He plucks the wrench from his belt and twirls it about in his hand. "Complicated, hell. The shit you work on can be the difference between life and death in the blink of an eye for a pilot. Don't knock yourself down any." As for him, well, he's a wrench-monkey through and through, of course. "So how're you finding it out on the Deck so far on Cerberus? I'm sure you've had this chat with the Chief already anyway. Things aren't always the same as they are - were - on other ships, I'm sure, but… I mean, circumstances have changed a bit, hey?"
"Wanna know the big difference? Clean floors. Godsdamned, you don't even know how much of a difference that makes. Bright, clean floors. SO much frakkin' easier to find stuff when you drop it. That, and light. Oooooh lords, LIGHT! So you can see what you're doing. Sometimes, I think the crews on older ships had to wear headlamps just to see what they were doing, you know?" His comment about the innuendo in her last though draws a grin from her. "If you're using jets in the bunk, something's either gone terribly wrong…or terribly, terribly right."
Damon and Cilusia are sitting facing one another on the benches, not too far from where the Cylon Heavy Raider sits. She's working with the armor a bit, and he's twirling a wrench idly in his hand - looks like they're just chatting a bit. "Well, we had clean floors," Damon laments. "All that shit we're pulling in from Parnassus is starting to clutter up a bit, though. Still, I know what you mean. I was on Heavy Cruiser Demeter for a while, and frak, she was an old, old beast." He shakes his head, though he smiles fondly to recall the ship. "Battlestar Hyperion was a piece of work, too."
Bannik is in his Deck coveralls, no surprise, and looking like he's just coming in for a shift working on the Heavy Raider. "Petty Officers," greets the Crewman, nodding to the two supervisors. "How's it going?"
Squeeeee! Someone to boss around! "We're discussing the virtues of machines having faces and being anthroprometasticized…or something like that. Looking like frakkin' humans. And now we're onto how this monstrosity of a ship," she starts, slapping the bulkhead behind the workbench on which she sits. "…is in comparison to the others."
"Actually, we were talking about masturbation," Damon says with a shrug and a broad smile as the Crewman walks in. "Hey, Bannik. Forget that Petty Officer shit, yeah? Just Damon here." He waves the wrench to the technician in greeting. "We were just talkin' about you a moment ago, actually. How's work with the Heavy Raider comin' along?" Another glance back to that Cylon ship. It's clear to see that he's definitely drawn in by it - intrigued, to say the least.
"—Uh." Bannik apparently doesn't have anything good to say. To either of them. So he does what he does best. He ignores it. "It's going okay. We're starting to pull away some of the outer panels and strip down the wiring inside. But the Exec seems to feel we're not moving fast enough." There is some resentment in his tone at that.
"Well, yeah, that too. But what else is new, really?" She doesn't exactly have a wrench as handy as Damon so she roots around on the workbench and finds…a powerdrill. So that's what she holds up, pulling the trigger once or twice, even pointing the head at Bannik. "Cilusia, here. Good to make your aquaintance."
"You go exactly the speed you need to go and tell him to frak off and do his own job if he starts getting antsy," Damon says to Bannik. He appears to be dead serious. "Maybe not in so many words, you know, but…" The wrench gets twirled and returned back to the belt, like a pistol to its holster. "I know I don't know you too good, but the Chief trusts you and says you're the best damn technician we got, and that's more than good enough for me. You do what you need to do at your pace and let me know if he or I need to calm someone down."
"What you need is an assembly line. You should wrangle up a bunch of people that are milling about the deck here, doing busy work or whatever, and have them all doing one single dinky little job, over and over and over. One person to unscrew the panel. One to collect the screws or whatever and put them with the panel. One to mark it. One to inventory and annotate it. On and on, until one person is finally pulling out the tech from inside." It's…an idea, for sure. Feasible? Who knows.
"I don't know that we have the spare manpower for something like that," Damon says to Cilusia with a wry twist of the lips. "Between keeping up regular shifts and maintenance, not to mention rotations through salvage ops, and people like Bannik who've been loaned out for special projects…" Shrug. "Maybe another department might be able to spare some general duty workers for a bit, though." He sounds skeptical as he says it. Everyone's been short-manned and working hard since Warday.
"It's fine. I mean, the work is getting done. It just takes /time/. It's meticulous. It's detail-oriented. If I did it any faster, I might lose something really important. I don't even know /what's/ important. Is the goo from the fore the same as the goo from the aft? I don't know. But it might be. So I need to segregate it." Bannik just seems frustrated. "Anyhow. What are the two of you working on?"
"I was thinking about getting some work the Chief tasked me with, but I blame Damon for keeping me from it." Once again, she lifts up a piece of that armor and clangs it against the workbench. "Wants me to have a look at some of the recovered pieces of armor and other gear from the station there to see if we can't think up some better says to take the toasters out and keep our people safe. Damon…well, I don't have a frakkin' clue what he's up to. Caught him staring at that ugly motherfrakker right there when I came down."
"Ugly? I don't think it's ugly," Damon replies quietly. Standing with a grunt, he steps toward the Heavy Raider, tilting his head a bit as he looks at it. "There's almost an… elegance to its design." He has respect for the enemy - or at least for their craftsmanship. "It was one of these frakkers that blew Vought away and damn near killed me." There's a silence as he sighs, unable to tear his eyes away from the ship. "Anyway, yeah, I should be out on the hangar bay floor. Gotta supervise and do some paperwork before I head up for another rotation for salvaging." But he doesn't move just yet.
"Yeah. Well. It might be pretty, but it sure is incomprehensible. I can't even figure out any of the readouts," mutters Bannik. "But I have to say — I can't figure out who the frak flies it. It almost looks like a human should be doing it, not one of those giant toasters."
"So wait…wait. You mean to say there's one of those walking clankers that sits in there and drives that thing? Why would it have that…that face right there on the front? Is that the Cylon way of saying a big 'EFF YOU HUMANS' with their huge faces for hood ornaments? Or what's the deal there?" Cilusia looks a little intrigued to hear Bannik's explanation; she even pulls one leg up onto the workbench, holding the knee towards her chest and getting her chin pretty close to or on her knee. She's pretty darn limber, save for the way those coveralls restrict her motion (and get stretched tight, if anyone looks).
Bannik gives Cilusia this funny look. "Well, it has a basic control yoke set-up. It seems to work the same way one of ours does, though I obviously can't know for certain. While one of the toasters would theoretically fit in the seat." He shrugs. "They wouldn't be able to control it. The controls are super-fine."
"Well…do you have any idea how fine the normal toaster's motor controls are? I have no frakkin' clue, but those hydraulics may be a little more precise than we give them credit for. Who knows?" Is it hypthetical? Does she actually want to know who onboard might know? Who knows?! That said, she just continues to sit on the bench, leg dangling, corner of her mouth pulled up, while her tongue pushes around the inside of the opposite cheek, thinking.
Damon seems to have spaced out for a bit, still staring at the Heavy Raider. Whatever conversation's going on between Bannik and Cilusia, it goes straight in one ear and out the other until he remembers to blink again. "Huh," he mutters to himself, starting to walk toward the hangar bay floor as he said he'd do a little while ago. "If you two need me, I'll…" the sentence trails off, and he leaves the two to discuss Cylonology.
"I don't know. It seems as if the claws on those big ones wouldn't be responsive enough to fly one of these, but I could be wrong. Like I said, the whole ship poses a lot more questions then it answers." Bannik shrugs his shoulders. "I'm just compiling all the information I can so we can try to figure it out."
"Good luck figuring it all out then. As Damon and I already established, neither of us is exactly qualified to do much of that work or figure it out. What with him being a wrench-jockey and me being a flight suit seamstress." She stops there a minute and grins. "Ah, right. We were just talking about the parallels between the words for ejecting from a Viper and getting it on in your bunk. That's right."
"Yeah. Well. On that note, I should go see if the Exec is ready to tear into me yet," says Bannik, gesturing with his finger towards the exit. "Uh. You have a good one, Cilusia, with — that stuff."