{VOICE OTA}

[rootandbranch]

[Today you feel a few strange pulses in your signets before you hear anything over Qri's network. It's fairly pleasant, exactly as the signet communications tend to be, and fortunately doesn't at all resemble the strange fluctuations that plagued everyone back on days 103-105. It's more like someone poking at the network to be sure it's stable and not going to do any more of that before they speak. They seem to conclude it's safe after all.]

Hello? Oh, hi-- hi, everybody. It's Geir. If you don't know me, I'm the dragon.

[He's very matter of fact about it. He's the dragon. You're probably aware, his tone seems to say.]

Listen, I don't actually care if you know me, you should just help me and Nines out! He knows all kinds of technology things, so I asked him what we could find out about the Hub with them. But the question is really, what does everyone want to find out? There's been a lot of weird to chew on!

Chew...on? [9S echoes this thought quizzically, for an instant quite distracted. But right, right, the matter at hand—] Er, anyway, like Geir said we’re lacking data on our surroundings. And to know what we’re dealing with, gathering more would be best, so I was thinking I can probably scrape enough parts together to build a pod for that job, once we know what kind of information it should collect. I mean, unless we want everything...

[Geir's tone is still bright and interested. he loves hearing about this, even if part of him is still skeptical.]

Nines isn't even the only person who knows how to build... robots. I know a bunch of you build stuff. Who wants to help?

[9S clears his throat, quietly tacking a little disclaimer on:]

...Not that pods should be mistaken for machines or anything.

[When your kind’s fought machines for millennia certain lines get drawn. Thin, confusing grey lines. (Geir doesn’t know what to say to that, so he just lets it stand.)]


((both 9S and Geir may reply to your toplevels, and also feel free to jump each other! this is the start of a player plot to get a little more technology on the island. ♥ more details here!))

Comments

[decipheringeye]

Oh! So, robots are more like wild animals? Which I guess would make a pod kind of like a trained dog, or something...

[deem]

It depends on how sophisticated the machines' designs are, I suppose... But they don't take after humanity like we do. Not usually.

I think it'd be an insult to pod 153 if I compared it with a dog. Pods are capable of far more sophisticated thought than that.

[decipheringeye]

[So it's less like a dog, and more like...]

...Are you having another son, 9S...?

[deem]

[He sputters]

A what?

[Hold on let him recover here]

Androids don't—can't—

[So much for recovery]

[decipheringeye]

You made someone, who's smaller and less intelligent than you, but still definitely alive, so what else would you call it?

[deem]

I didn't construct Pod 153, but it was assigned to me. Pods are pods.

[decipheringeye]

Who made it, then?

[deem]

Other androids, same as me. Production's done in other orbiting facilities, but not in the Bunker.

[decipheringeye]

So it's more like adoption, or... maybe it really is just its own thing that humans don't have after all.

[deem]

Yeah, I wouldn't call pods our children or anything like that. They look out for us, for one thing.