David (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
noman) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ataraxionlogs2015-10-02 09:17 pm
noman) wrote in ataraxionlogs2015-10-02 09:17 pm
Entry tags:
a series of meetings
CHARACTERS: David, Charles 'Groovy Mutation' Xavier, Erik 'Buckethead' Lehnsherr, maybe others.
LOCATION: Base Camp's makeshift science station, the wreck of the Tranquility, maybe elsewhere.
WARNINGS: Just a little violence.
SUMMARY: David makes some friends. :)
NOTES: Catch-all, closed starters inside. Drop a line if you'd like to collide.
EXT. BASE CAMP – DAY
Having only very recently made the decision to join base camp, David has spoken to few of its residents, but the number of faces familiar to him is growing all the same. Familiar at close range, that is. After days of observation, he can already identify many of the camp's residents at a distance, albeit not by name—and given his scientific leanings, which have brought him often to the very tents David now approaches, Charles Xavier is one of these people.
He stops shy of the raised platforms, hands at his sides, and for a while just looks at all the equipment laid out before him, his eyes moving about with interest while his head turns in brief but smooth increments. With his perfect posture, neatly combed hair and unblemished skin, he radiates the impression that the Tranquility jumpsuit he wears would have been pressed free of wrinkles if only he had access to a proper iron and board. Even his boots have been attended to, the mud knocked from the soles, the uppers brushed clean.
The moment he sees a body move into view—the one he recognises, not so coincidentally—this tall, bright-eyed stranger turns his face toward it and waits, looking pleasantly expectant. It becomes clear before long that he hasn't been noticed, and so:
"Hello, there."
INT. TRANQUILITY WRECKAGE – DAY
Hours later, once again zipped into his streamlined excursion suit, David is still vaguely contemplating his meetings thus far while he examines a bag he's found. Standard-issue, nylon, still flattened from previously airtight storage. This will do. He slips his gloved fingers through a hole in the plastic packaging and tears it away.
What's left of the Tranquility medical bay is still frequented by bodies on the regular, and so much of what is useful has been taken, but not all eyes are equally discerning. Once he happened upon a nearly complete set of dentistry tools, his shopping list grew organically—now his latest find, what looks almost like a pen with a little lever, he treats with especial care by wrapping it in gauze, slipping it into a side pocket all its own. A box of fine needles joins it soon, and some long-handled cotton swabs, and several precious doses of anaesthetic. The beam of his flashlight appears, sweeps to a neighbouring area cast into shadow by damaged circuits, searches briefly before he prudently snuffs it again. If X-ray machines of even partial portability exist here he'd like to find one, but that isn't in the cards today. It's just as well, since on his way back to the exit climb he's already carrying an autoclave the size of a microwave oven. With one hand. Cradled in his other arm like a bouquet of roses is a canister of nitrous oxide, and the accompanying tubes and variously sized nasal masks fill the bag on his shoulder. (He saw oxygen back at base camp, otherwise that would have been first priority.)
Whatever it was that had driven him to excessive caution regarding those at camp, he's glad it has past. If one must be marooned on an alien world, company is preferable, he thinks. And then he stops, astonished, having just come face-to-face with a man of uncanny resemblance to... himself.
LOCATION: Base Camp's makeshift science station, the wreck of the Tranquility, maybe elsewhere.
WARNINGS: Just a little violence.
SUMMARY: David makes some friends. :)
NOTES: Catch-all, closed starters inside. Drop a line if you'd like to collide.
EXT. BASE CAMP – DAY
Having only very recently made the decision to join base camp, David has spoken to few of its residents, but the number of faces familiar to him is growing all the same. Familiar at close range, that is. After days of observation, he can already identify many of the camp's residents at a distance, albeit not by name—and given his scientific leanings, which have brought him often to the very tents David now approaches, Charles Xavier is one of these people.
He stops shy of the raised platforms, hands at his sides, and for a while just looks at all the equipment laid out before him, his eyes moving about with interest while his head turns in brief but smooth increments. With his perfect posture, neatly combed hair and unblemished skin, he radiates the impression that the Tranquility jumpsuit he wears would have been pressed free of wrinkles if only he had access to a proper iron and board. Even his boots have been attended to, the mud knocked from the soles, the uppers brushed clean.
The moment he sees a body move into view—the one he recognises, not so coincidentally—this tall, bright-eyed stranger turns his face toward it and waits, looking pleasantly expectant. It becomes clear before long that he hasn't been noticed, and so:
"Hello, there."
INT. TRANQUILITY WRECKAGE – DAY
Hours later, once again zipped into his streamlined excursion suit, David is still vaguely contemplating his meetings thus far while he examines a bag he's found. Standard-issue, nylon, still flattened from previously airtight storage. This will do. He slips his gloved fingers through a hole in the plastic packaging and tears it away.
What's left of the Tranquility medical bay is still frequented by bodies on the regular, and so much of what is useful has been taken, but not all eyes are equally discerning. Once he happened upon a nearly complete set of dentistry tools, his shopping list grew organically—now his latest find, what looks almost like a pen with a little lever, he treats with especial care by wrapping it in gauze, slipping it into a side pocket all its own. A box of fine needles joins it soon, and some long-handled cotton swabs, and several precious doses of anaesthetic. The beam of his flashlight appears, sweeps to a neighbouring area cast into shadow by damaged circuits, searches briefly before he prudently snuffs it again. If X-ray machines of even partial portability exist here he'd like to find one, but that isn't in the cards today. It's just as well, since on his way back to the exit climb he's already carrying an autoclave the size of a microwave oven. With one hand. Cradled in his other arm like a bouquet of roses is a canister of nitrous oxide, and the accompanying tubes and variously sized nasal masks fill the bag on his shoulder. (He saw oxygen back at base camp, otherwise that would have been first priority.)
Whatever it was that had driven him to excessive caution regarding those at camp, he's glad it has past. If one must be marooned on an alien world, company is preferable, he thinks. And then he stops, astonished, having just come face-to-face with a man of uncanny resemblance to... himself.
TRANQUILITY WRECKAGE
He’s stopped dead, teeth and eyes glistening wet, one of them -- his left -- clouded white. Blind.
His jumpsuit is older than it should be, seams rough, panels faded, scars in the fabric stitched back together in thick ridges. Plate armor moulded across the breast and shoulders bulks his frame. Behind him, daylight stands out in columns punched through the gash in the hull, bleaching water-damaged supplies, searing drips of runoff into steam.
His hair is brown; his whiskers are ginger. He’s a few days out from his last shave.
A beetle blzzzzes noisily from one side of the chasm to the other, and he doesn’t flinch, radiating hostility the same way rotting garbage on the floor seems to breathe humidity and stink.
He is holding: one pair of Rayban sunglasses. They dangle folded from his fingers.
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"Erik?"
The first thing was his own name, as he knows very well that he isn't one of a kind. Wasn't. Still isn't, perhaps, if what so recently happened to him has already happened before—and to him, the other body standing right here, looking much the worse for wear, might have seemed like proof that it has happened were it not for that scientist he met back in the camp. The fundamental similarity really is astonishing. Even his voice is a gentler take on Erik's own, cautious, but not fearful. Of course the man looks fearsome; anyone might be hardened by whatever he went through to reach such a state. Perhaps he's really just afraid.
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Yes, it is Erik.
He follows magnetism on foot. Lead by the broken glass edge on his good eye, he never quite closes in, and stops to take stock when he’s still well out of arm’s reach.
“What are you.”
Here, it’s easier to see where manticore teeth have marked at his scalp behind the ear. On his blind side, light shows through his silhouette where part of the ear is missing entirely.
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His mouth remains open, waits for input from his CPU—now a brain, more literally than ever before, fragile organic matter assembled not in a dust-free laboratory but by some unnamed architect. Ultimately, with a meaningful roll of his gaze to the structure above, he opts for the pragmatic approach.
"It would be wise to postpone any conversation till we've moved clear of the wreckage." His confidence is meant to be reassuring. "If you'd care to accompany me."
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The pulse intensifies into a throb, in and out like the ship’s breath seething at David’s ears and in his teeth. Individual elements shriek and groan under the stress of their own weight; the cavern echoes and reflects their cries inward and upward, through the gash in the hull.
Erik takes a step closer, hackles lifting under steady pressure.
“I am the wreckage.”
His voice carries on the same resonant frequency; he doesn’t have to raise it to be heard.
When the last bit of glass falls, its descent is broken by a second shatter and scatter of shards in a wide circle around them, fragments prattling through the debris.
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Is what he does not say aloud, but his face does, and his posture, as he's startled into a slouch from the waist up. It's the noise that does it, the sudden rasp and clatter of that opening circle. The ship's half-living carcass resounds with the promise of preternatural violence, the warning thrums through his ribcage, gathers in the hollow of his throat—and yes, his teeth, which buzz against one another where they barely touch until he presses them together to stop it. His glove has tightened on the lip of the autoclave. Fingers sweating inside. His gaze flicks left or right, the rest of him gone rigid.
But then one of those glances grows less furtive, allowing him more than just a few concerned glimpses away from Erik's grim face and back again. No longer transfixed in surprise, David looks freely at the rising accumulation of ominous shapes, at the floor gone bare around their feet—even turning at the waist until he must step to retain balance, showing Erik the back of his shoulder.
"How marvellous," he says, hushed in artless sincerity.
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The only grace to initial impact is in efficiency: a slab of metal the size of a car door slams forward no holds barred from behind that turned shoulder, firing David off of his feet and onward, airborne, at a near pristine forty-five degree angle. It’s an introduction to flight forceful enough to punch him through the ring of debris drifting around them, and to fold in the ribs of a human.
He’ll land -- wherever. Erik isn’t anticipating having any trouble tracking him down.
The autoclave will levitate patiently in place if the (former) android allows it to be torn free of his fingers in the process.
If not it will suffer his fate alongside him.
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Alarms everywhere inside. Ribs screaming. Pulsating warmth above his eyebrow. But he's landed apart from the heavy slab, with nothing weighing him down but the battered bag, which slides off the curve of his back with a muffled thump as his arms push some distance between his head and the floor. There he stalls, partly risen from the waist up, boot slowly dragging in to prepare for the rest of it.
Nine feet tall, translucent, magnificent and wise, the stroke of a gentle hand becomes brutal, lifting, twisting, tearing. Everything gone wrong.
There's... nothing.
I know.
Instead of getting to his feet, David twists painfully to aim a bewildered grimace at the figure behind him: What did I do?
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Outside the ship, Charles has to play catch up. It's a confusing kaleidoscope of dimly lit perspectives with the same face overlapping, of emotion, but physical pain paints through one half of the information he's getting.
Inside, Erik feels Charles' psychic presence like a hand on his arm.The suggestion is gently delivered, but doesn't sound like it will tolerate deviation.
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The logical contradiction vexes him.
He is vexed.
From the exterior, this looks like a coiling shift in weight, wrath pressurized beneath the bulkhead of his shoulders. He hasn't moved, otherwise, save to breathe, the one eye cut clear after David's pale face twisting back to him.
"He wasn't with the others," he says.
Controlled. Terse. One half of an argument.
The canister of nitrous hangs at an uncertain tilt some two or three inches from the floor, spared at the last second.
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"I stayed behind." Thin-voiced, spoken to the side, as he can't bend like that for long. Nothing but blood vessels have broken beneath his skin, but he doesn't know that—it's impossible to tell by breathing alone, and all he can be certain of is the pain spreading across his back, and above his eye, a throb for every beat of his heart. The urge to cough is strong, but he doesn't dare. "I was frightened." Words scraped raw by strain.
A moment later, with both legs gathered sufficiently for leverage, David says, "I'd like to get up."
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Charles feels that kneejerk instinct to ignore his influence and raises Erik his own image superimposed in the gloom of the Tranquility, picking a hell of a time to demonstrate his recently reclaimed prowess. In Erik's mind's eye, he stands just at his side, where that ghost feeling of a touch is now shown as a hand feather-light on his arm.
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“Be. Still.”
There's poison in command, corrosion that wears the same voice into something coarse, all acrid metal and sawed teeth. What little he empathic output he registers across Medbay cools the hollow where he has his soul stuffed in under his heart, mounting fear into resolve.
“He isn't human.”
Erik issues counterargument in direct aside to Charles, who isn't there, eyes blind and sighted fixed on target with a fervor that belies control in the quiet of his voice. Quiet to tune David out of this A & B conversation.
It's not very effective.
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base camp.
The voice doesn't quite register as familiar, the alienness of the mind its attached to doing much to distract from similar slants of tone. Charles turns, the creak and groan of the roughly constructed platform audible under heel, holding a tray.
And startles, anyway, phenomenal cosmic powers be damned. Sample containers clatter together when his hands twitch.
"Erik?"
His voice pitches up, as confused as he is-- well. What's a term one of his students would have used. Creeped out has a certain charm, and the affect of the uncanny is immediately jarring. Not to be rude or anything.
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"I'm afraid not."
They do sound similar, though. There is great similarity in height, too, and in the broad shoulders, long waist and narrow hips. But he is blond, for a start, with two working eyes, and their full attention is not quite so intense. Crisp, precise, yes, he is all of those things—also patient, and even-tempered, and curious above all else, especially at this particular moment. Were his mind a switchboard, that part would be blinking all the more ferociously for Xavier's mistake, the riddle of which he supposes will unravel itself organically in time.
Also notable: not a scrap of metal has been bent around his body like an exoskeleton of paranoia.
"My name is David. I've come to offer my services to your science department." Your quaint jungle frontier science department, with air quotes, this glance suggests. "Such as it is."
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His thumbs fidget with the tray he's holding, before he finally sets it down with minimal fuss, with a rattle of plastic containers.
"Such as it is," Charles echoes, agreeably, but hasn't quite recovered his own composure and he's only sort of registered that this man is offering anything at all beyond existing uncomfortably in front of him. "I'm sorry, you-- I mistook you for someone else. Obviously. You're new, then, here."
Words patch over his fussing, hands gripping together loosely. He might look the part of the scientist, perhaps in a way more so than he did ten years ago, prim and proper. He needs a haircut, any time, and his clothing is standard Tranquility fare. He wears, too, a silver wristwatch that's stopped long ago, a gesture of sentiment, or individuality.
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It's delivered with dry awareness of the limited number of bodies here—a transparent ice-breaker. He is, after all, programmed to put humans at ease. Or was. His thoughts have had time enough to buzz about that issue, though, and are now content to wait for further clues as those come along. In the meantime, as long as there are eyes on him, he'll do as he was taught.
"Yes, since this morning. After escaping the wreckage," surely no clarification is necessary, "I spotted the lights and was able to make my way here." But he entered the camp proper only after a period of cautionary instinct, days of nesting near enough to the community to be safe but still apart from them, of learning to fend for himself in the most necessary ways. It was only when he decoded the response as fear that he decided to overcome it.
"Sorry for the fright," he adds, through a smile that Charles would not be blamed for interpreting as a bit cheeky. It does look it. But perhaps that's just his face.
(He'll be sure to ask about this Erik fellow when it might feel less intrusive.)
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human
about apology, accompanying smile, that aforementioned transparent ice-breaker didn't immediately accomplish. "It's alright," he says, milder, less awkwardly. Where were they. This man is named David, and-- "My name is Charles, although I suppose you must've gotten that far. Welcome to camp."
There isn't a gratuitous amount of room in his quaint jungle laboratory, but enough for two people to fit comfortably without standing in rigid formality. Charles loosely gestures in invitation to be followed up onto the platform and beneath the angled shade. He defaults to being polite, and to sympathy, as a matter of course. He can see those glimmers of memory -- of isolation, and fear, and swallowing it after so long -- without trying.
"We're in the process of creating a taxonomy, although we're still in the process of salvaging hardware. Obviously, we've had to start from scratch. We haven't been on this planet for very long, ourselves."
(He'll dance around the subject of Erik?! until he's run out of script.)
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"So I see." Again, the whiff of a smile; that all sounded a bit like an apology for the state of the department. How charming. "All things considered, it looks serviceable enough—doctor, is it?"
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He hasn't any students, and his science department is made of jungle wood and scrap metal and plastic sheets. Even the signs of his prior leadership, which had been printed so definitely into his skin in bold red, have scattered to uniform black distortion.
The framework putting it all together is sturdy, though, enough that Charles finds a place to lean, a foot kicked behind an ankle and arms folding over his chest, more comfortable in angles than at a hover. He's wearing his continued astonishment less on his face, but he still can't quite keep the staring out of simple looking. "And what did you do, before all this?"
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There, first-name basis. Familiarity achieved. David receives his question with polite interest, slightly raised eyebrows and all. He has nowhere immediate to lean, himself, but doesn't seem to suffer any discomfort for it. (nor for the sustained eyeballing.)
"I served as mission attendant aboard a craft called the USCSS Prometheus. While the crew remained in hypersleep during our voyage, it was my duty to maintain ship systems, then to see to their needs once they awoke." He was not bored, nor was he lonely, or afraid, or even content. He simply was. Should Charles go snooping, in fact, he will find not a glimmer of emotion attached to any of those memories. No emotion at all. Even now he is relatively quiet inside; mostly there's a steady level of interest that pips whenever Charles speaks to him, like a Geiger counter passing across traces of an isotope.
"I can offer support wherever it's needed most." David 8 has valuable skills in manufacturing, finance, earth sciences and medicine, and—no. He flutters a blink, presses forth another natural smile. "Salvage to start, perhaps?"
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Charles' brow twinges at the inherent strangeness of memory. Photographs devoid of colour are less striking than memories devoid of emotion.
He has other justifications, even for the neutral grey emotional landscape depicted as they talk now. Some people have basic telepathic immunity, for whatever reason -- magic, brainwashing, and simple practice are all possibilities. But there is a way that David's brain works, fusing with recollection, that gives him away.
"You--"
He pauses. Considers. Reverses.
"Salvage to start. I think that would be very helpful. But can I ask you something personal? We can trade, if you like," is added, a little wry. He's definitely acted odder, out of the two of them.
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He may not answer the question if he doesn't like it, but Charles is absolutely free to ask, and David is keen to ask in return. In fact, he's already begun to think about it despite also thinking he should wait to see what the professor will ask him first—and his focus doesn't much suffer for it, either. He may be emotionally reserved, but his mind, the machine itself, is quick with energy.
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It's gentle nudge, really, when he asks; "What else were you?"
There are a lot of answers for that. Not just limited to a robot, certainly, and Charles doesn't look like he's going to press for a specific answer, beyond allowing room for one more try. There is curiousity in the cant of his head and a kindness about the rest of him.
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Unfortunately, he is not human. He will never grow old; he will never die. And yet, he is unable to appreciate these remarkable gifts, for that would require the one thing that David will never have: a soul. Digitally transmitted, the wizened face of Peter Weyland announces this to a room full of people, looking right at him.
But surely this Charles can't mean that. That would be an impossible feat of perception. Even if he watched David's dreams during the long sleep—though he can't remember dreaming—he wouldn't have asked, and certainly not so gently, as no human to date has been subtle in the desire to inform him of his inferiority. Why should they be? He can't feel it anyway.
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