fh_trips | Kellerman's Resort, Tuesday Morning and Afternoon, October 13th

Entry tags:

fall break 2009: kellerman's

Kellerman's Resort, Tuesday Morning and Afternoon, October 13th

The weather at Kellerman's continued to be favourable, as the autumn sun shone down on the fields and streams of the area. The staff of the resort were busy but happy to help, bustling through the corridors and courtyard.

The boards outside were advertising a white water rafting trip today, for anyone willing to go out and risk the rapids; for the less adventurous, a trip to see the Cascade Falls might just do the trick.

[[ Cottage and Room List | Rooms | Activities Barn | Indoor Activities | Outdoor Activities | White Water Rafting | Cascade Falls | OOC | OCD up! ]]

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Dinah grimaced. "Yeah, that's... not a good way to make friends and influence people here, I'd guess." She gave him a sympathetic look. "But that's not you. You're the one keeping it in check, after all. Even if Scarab is damaged, you're not acting on what it's saying." She tilted her head. "Do I want to know hwo it says to neutralize me?"

"Whether it's me or not, I now know a lot of stuff that people don't want me to." Jaime shrugged. It wasn't fun, really, but he was unfortunately used to it.

"And... I don't know? Do you? The Scarab is very good. Most of the ideas it puts forward are really hard to counter, so it might just be depressing."

Dinah kind of got that, from all the stuff that had leaked through people's skin into her brain, the first few months she was in Fandom. And before that.

But that second thing, that deserved serious consideration. Did she want to know? Well... if there was something there she couldn't counter, better to know about it now. "Yeah. I do."

Jaime took a deep breath and then spent a moment conferring with the Scarab. Just to get the details down right.

"Telekinesis is the easy one," he eventually said, voice soft. "The Scarab recommends energy based weapons. A laser or electricity or something similar. Hard to avoid and not enough mass to be easily manipulated."

"And two options for the touch telepathy thing, depending on what goals were in play. Direct electric current as a defense. You'd probably have a hard time paying attention to any thoughts if every time you touched someone you got a major electric shock. And overwhelming mental experience as an attack. The Scarab estimates that it would take you a minimum of two or three minutes to recover if it dumped the contents of its memory bank to you when you touched me."

Dinah nodded, face set, thinking hard about that first one, and swallowed. "Probably not, yeah. If I got tasered, well. I could maybe manage to get the taser away from someone. But I'd still be messed up." She let out a slow breath, tracing the rip of her cocoa mug. She thought of the leather jacket and kevlar panels in the coat she wore in New Gotham, and made a note to mention what he'd said to Barbara. She might have another idea. Not that that would help hits to the head....

She swallowed. "And yeah, shock when I touch someone-- it's hard to do anyway, sometimes. Most people are never aware it's happened. The only time anyone's felt me is when they were telepaths themselves. Professor Atreides says that I have a very light natural signature." Dinah bit her lip. Probably from wanting not to hurt anyone, and denying it so long. "But if they knew. Or could detect it. Yeah. That would-- I'm getting better, at shielding, and telling what's me, and what's someone else. But I've been knocked out before, when what was in someone's head was something really awful."

Jaime stared at his own mug of cocoa in order to avoid looking at Dinah. "The Scarab has schematics for something called an Arc Projector. It's sort of like a taser, but with no wires or anything. A lightning gun, I guess. That's what it would recommend to take you out at a distance."

"I'm not a threat, though. Does it know that?" Dinah had to ask, hating how plaintive she sounded. "I don't like knowing stuff that's in people's heads most of the time. Either it's painful or it's boring, and there's only a couple people that it's... comfortable." She sighed. "And the TK-- I try so hard not to cheat here, to only play with it against people who have magic or TK of their own. I don't want to freak anyone out, or hurt them. I'm learning to use it as a weapon to protect me. And other people." She bit her lip, studying him. "Can it tell that?" Then, even quieter, "You can. I hope?"

Edited 2009-10-14 19:29 (UTC)

"The Scarab doesn't really do intent," Jaime sighed. Then, almost too softly to hear, "Not anymore."

He took a long sip of hot chocolate to buy himself some time to put his thoughts together. "It's one of the reasons it needs a host. The Scarab just does numbers and figures and possibilities. It needs a mind to figure out what people might do rather than what they can do."

He sighed, still staring down at his mug. "I can tell it you're not a threat, but the Scarab doesn't understand that." Anymore.

"Did something happen to it?" Dinah asked, almost as quietly. "You make it sound like it got damaged a second time." She'd relaxed a bit at his answer, because yeah, that made sense. An AI wouldn't get emotions, wouldn't read intentions, and an alien AI, double that. "When would it understand that? Ever?"

"There was... an incident. It resulted in the Scarab executing a forced shutdown. We weren't even sure if it would wake up again, but when it did... things were different."

He sounded a bit wistful.

Dinah tilted her head. "Sounds-- traumatic?" She bit her lip. "Are you okay with it now?"

"We were... friends before." The Scarab had been a 'he' then, not an 'it'.

"It's... different now."

"Because it has amnesia?" Dinah checked, giving him a sympathetic look. "Or something? I mean, that's what I think of when I think of 'reboot.'"

"I don't know. Maybe something like that. Or its personality got damaged, or... No one really knows."

"I'm sorry," Dinah said gently, feeling like she was talking about the death of a friend of his, sort of. Strange, but how else could you define it? She sighed and took another sip of cocoa, thinking. "That has to be rough. With the constant threat-assessment in your head." She tilted her head and said, "So... does that have anything to do with your school getting blown up by aliens?"

Jaime reached back to rub at his neck. "Yeah. Kind of. There was a group of other Scarabs that came after me. They each had all the abilities that I did, so the only thing to do was to shut them all down. Which we didn't manage to do before they'd blown up the building."

"Holy crap." Dinah winced, watching Jaime carefully, and then shook her head. "What did they want? More of that conquer-the-world stuff?"

"It's... complicated." Really, really complicated. "But... essentially, yeah. They wanted to take over the planet and all that cliched stuff."

Dinah just shook her head again, thinking, thoughts whirling with all the info. Strategic assessment, aliens, constant paranoid threat talk, people not trusting Jaime, Jaime having to trust people who were dangerous... "It makes my head hurt. And it's not even my problem."

"Sorry," Jaime mumbled. Because obviously that was his fault.

"What?" Dinah blinked at him, thrown off-balance, then reached for him, her hand curling into a fist as she set it gently down on the counter. "Jaime, no, not your fault, I'm just-- sometimes my own stuff can be rough. And yours sounds even rougher, you know? I don't know how you're dealing with it so well."

"Hey, I'm lucky," Jaime smiled, looking up at her. "I have awesome friends and an amazing family to get me through the rough patches." And until recently, a hot and understanding girlfriend.

"The rough patches aren't nearly so rough when you've got all those people who care about you."

Dinah grinned at him for that, kind of relieved on his behalf. "That's cool. Your family knows all about it, hunh? You don't have to keep anything from them? You are lucky."

"How are you supposed to keep something like that from your parents?" Jaime laughed incredulously. "I mean... I still lived in their house."

And there'd been that whole 'missing for a year' thing.

"Some people try," Dinah said obliquely. "I mean. It's not really possible, but." She shrugged, gave him a sideways smile. "Not everybody has cool parents who'd help with it."

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