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 Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 6:53 pm
"Where -is- this Aastaium?"
"The 'Earth' he's from. He's from another reality. But that's besides the point. I think that's a great idea, Ocarina. Don't you think so, Charon?"
Charon nodded, having liked the idea but now liking it less now that Marcus had voted for it. She held grudges like that. "Yes, its a wonderful idea. Will I be getting my upgrade there as well? In Aastaium, I mean." This time Charon's attention went to Tika.
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Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 7:16 pm
With no great fanfare save for an incredibly loud boom, two ships arrived in Aastaian airspace.
"Where is it?" Tika said with a grin. "Right here, of course. Ocarina, you field her other question while I deal with D-control."
He turned to Mark quickly, still with the grin. "Oh. Welcome to my home."
Ocarina happily obliged, eager to talk, apparently.
"If you want to be made fully conscious, then yes we can have it done here. You'll have to be taken offline for a while, though, for the changes to be made.
"Yeah, Aastaium Dimensional Traffic Control? This is the registered ship Nostalgia for Infinity, belonging to Bu'Tika of Cesilingbyr. I have with me a salvaged Cornelian vessel with no owner." He shot Mark a small explanatory glance.
"And I'd like to get some repairs and upgrades done."
"Welcome home, Bu'Tika!" ADTC replied, a chirpy female operative.
"I'll just log your return, though it was unscheduled, and then we'll be able to arrange a suitable time for a Shipyard to service the vessel!
Hm, yes. I have you on the ship register!"
"Thankyou very much!" Tika said gratiously, slipping into kind and happy Aastaian mode again, having forgotten before.
"If it's alright, I'll set down both ships in the Nekrit Expanse."
Ocarina was already doing so, of course.
"That's just fine, Bu'Tika! I'll contact you again when I have a Shipyard placement booked!"
Tika slumped as the line cut off.
"The more I have to deal with these people- My people... The more I start to hate them."
He sighed. "There. I said it. They make me sick. So good and nice and so <******** naive. I hope the DC Council is developing a weapons programme."
He turned again to Mark and Charon, shrugging. "Sorry. Ignore me. Sometimes you gotta get stuff off your chest, you know? Anyway, we'll just settle here until that lovely happy little lady's got us a scheduled time to get this ship fixed.
Hey Ocarina? You doing alright on your own?"
The air beside Tika shimmered, then flickered into Ocarina's holographic representation.
"Just fine. Thought I'd make use of this ship's bridge holo-emitters."
He turned to Charon, giving a small and polite wave. "Yo."
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 12:00 pm
"Offline?" Charon feared the idea, seeing as how she's been offline for quite sometime.
Mark looked over at Charon and smiled slightly, "Don't worry I'll make sure you get back up and running again, soon." He then turned to Tika with a grin, now incredibly interested, wondering if Aastaium truly possessed the beauties that Tika had described. As well as how the people were. When Tika was talking to the Traffic Control operator, he nodded when Tika mentioned that the Pegasus had no owner.
Charon then looked from Tika to Mark and back, trying not to laugh.
Instead Mark did so, except he chuckled at Tika's words towards his hatred for his people. "It's alright, Tika.. I mea-- Ocarina!!!" Mark was cut off when Ocarina appeared beside Tika. He wasn't surprised by Ocarina's apperance, just by the sudden-ness of it. Things popping out of thin air aren't exactly Mark's strong suit.
Mark smirked at Ocarina when he waved at Charon, turning his head to look at her, he noticed she was silent.
But nonetheless, Charon returned the wave with a small polite smile.
Mark looked over at Tika and gave him a slight nod. "I think she likes you-know-who..."
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 12:40 pm
Tika returned the nod. "I think you-know-who likes her too."
He turned then to look out of the forward observation window. As his eyes panned over the lush green fields, sporadic clumps of trees, and not a building on the horizon for miles, he smirked.
Once again Ki'Rasa had missed out on a trip home.
Ocarina disappeared in the blink of an eye, then similarly reappeared in front of Charon.
"You look a lot better than I could've expected." He said with a charming grin.
"Ok Bu'Tika! I have one free slot for you in three and a half hours!" The DTC operative's voice came crystal clear through the comms.
"Thankyou!" Tika responded chirpily. "Have a nice day!"
"And you!" And the comms fell silent again.
Tika switched back to the common language.
"Well then people, perhaps we want to go and have a wander around my planet. Ocarina, call up an observation speeder."
"Aye aye." Ocarina replied, turning his attention from Charon for the most fleeting of seconds.
He flashed Mark another grin. "Oh you'll love this."
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 1:12 pm
"Heh... a little too much..." Mark muttered when he stepped away from Charon and Ocarina.
"I would say the same about you but..." Charon retorted to Ocarina with a smirk as she took a step back.
Mark finished Charon's thought with a smirk as he stepped beside Tika. "You're not taken. Prome' is dead... So Tika, about your planet. Would I need a translator? Would there be any Cornelians within a fifty mile radius?"
Charon scoffed and disappeared, "Everything's a joke with you, you stupid vigen, praksha"
Mark looked at Ocarina with a grin, "Don't worry, she might start talking again later. You're coming with us, right? That's if you can..."
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 1:59 pm
Ocarina narrowed his eyes at Mark. Sure, the human was giving him an excuse to lay on the charm, but Ocarina wasn't happy that Charon didn't seem to like Mark.
"Of course I can." Ocarina snapped, disappearing the way Charon had.
Tika shrugged at Mark's question. "Maybe holiday-makers, day-trippers. A few that have moved here."
A blip on the Pegasus' barely functional radar indicated the arrival of the observation speeder.
"No doubt we won't get a teleport now you pissed off Ocarina, so let's head on out, shall we?"
Assuming that Mark agreed, and they both headed out, Tika stepped out into the sunlight and stretched out his arms.
"There is no world with better sunlight than my home. I swear." He said to Mark with none too subtle traces of pride.
"I see someone already made it aboard." He pointed to Ocarina sitting inside the OS, a levitating elongated cuboid structure with a curved front. Almost the entire front, sides, and top were glass, or at least translucent. Tucked underneath the speeder were it's largely unnecessary legs, only used in terrain where the not even the advanced computers to maneuvre the speeder fast enough, like forest.
"Ok, now it is essentially the same stuff as the suits are made of, so just approach the canopy and walk through, the nanites will open up where your body passes through."
To demonstrate, he went first, stepping up to and then through the canopy. Though it seemed he was phasing through the 'glass', it was actually opening up around his body as a tight seal, and if one looked closely enough, they would see the 'glass' around Tika thicken slightly as the displaced nanites temporarily moved aside.
Inaudible to Mark still on the outside, Tika spoke to Ocarina.
"Charon coming with us? I presume there's space for her programme on the sppeder as well as yours."
Ocarina only shrugged.
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 2:38 pm
Marcus frowned slightly and led the way out of the ship and winced at the intensily bright sunlight. "Yeah, you're not kidding. Suit, retract torso." He smirked slightly to himself, just remembering he still had the suit on. Moving on, Marcus nodded to what Tika said about entering the speeder and did so. He felt a slight tingle as he stepped 'through' the 'glass' and looked back, and stopped almost bumping into Tika. "Heh."
That's when Charon appeared beside Ocarina, her arms crossed and making believe Marcus wasn't there. She looked at Tika with a slight smile, "I must say, Tika, this is quite a beautiful planet you have here. More pure than Cornelia, Earth and Earth 0147 put together. I'm impressed."
Marcus rolled his eyes, muttering to himself. "Now I know what my father had to deal with."
Charon retorted to Marcus' little thought, telepathically. "Damn right, boy. But this is just the beginning."
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 3:34 pm
Tika ignored the exchange and instead shunted aside Ocarina's holographic representation from the driver's seat; only a courtesy, Ocarina had no physical presence.
There were only two seats, also, so the holograms rode in the back.
After requesting manual controls, he turned to his passengers with a grin. He engaged his safety webbing, which was similar to that onboard the Nostalgia; a sort of mould that crept from the seat and enveloped the wearer's chest, holding them securely to the seat.
"Please buckle up. Well, those of us that have to, Mark."
"Oh crap." Ocarina muttered. Or predicted.
When Mark had done so, he gave a small nod, and instantly thrust the control column forward.
From an external viewpoint, the speeder instantly tore from a static position, and was away across the landscape. The acceleration was phenonemal, around two hundred miles an hour acheived in just under a second, the dampening field inside the speeder keeping it's occupants nice and safe.
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 4:54 pm
Marcus shrugged and sat beside Tika, and buckled up. He was just about to ask Ocarina what was wrong, but was distracted by how comfortable the seat was. Soon enough, Mark realized at the speed the OS was going and after a couple of seconds, he looked over at Tika and grinned. "You're insane."
Charon frowned, concerned by the rate of the OS and considered it quite dangerous. Nonetheless, she didn't care and didn't mention it. She turned to Ocarina. "So how long have you 'worked' with Tika?"
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 6:07 pm
Tika chose not to respond to Mark in any way. Unless you include upping the speed as a response.
The acceleration was once again almost instantaneous, and the Observational Speeder hit 761 miles per hour, letting out a deafening boom as it ripped through the sound barrier into Mach 1.
"Oh, all of my life." Ocarina replied.
"He created me as a school project when he was seven years old, that was two hundred and forty-four years ago. Wow. I'm old."
"Not as old as me." Tika muttered jokingly.
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 6:23 pm
Mark was left speechless and looked straight ahead as he listened to Ocarina and Charon's conversation. "So that would mean I'm older than Tika." He shot a quick glance at the 'boy' beside him and then thought back to Crimson, and felt a huge sense of emptyness within himself. "Stupid cryogenics..." Marcus ended up saying out loud, without realizing.
Charon smiled as she listened to Ocarina. "Incredible.. at the age of seven? Impressive. But how did you manage to live for so long and appear so young? It isn't your genectic make-up is it? Surely there must have been something else that was responsible for that.."
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 6:29 pm
Only pressing two buttons, Tika set the OS into a semi-autopilot mode, which was actually more worrying than it sounded, if one knew just what it entailed.
He turned to Charon, and opened up the top of his shirt to reveal what appeared to be a tattoo capable of movement, but was actually the amulet reduced to 2D form and residing just beneath his dermal layer (skin).
"Cut a long story short, it's the amulet. It's kept me from ageing this long, but it's been fractured. It's effects are degrading. Speaking of biology, though, Aastaians do tend to live longer. We have an auxiliary heart that kicks in if the main one fails. If it's just a temporary health issue the main heart will start back up and the auxiliary one stop. If it's old age, the auxiliary heart will only keep us going for a few more years."
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 6:44 pm
Marcus was getting a bit sleepy, having slipped into a very calm state as he stared at the beauty of Aastaium. Drowning out the voices of the other three aboard. Totally loving the comfort of the seat.
Charon nodded, staring at the 'tattoo' in awe. "Wow, your race is simply amazing. But is there no way to repair the amulet?"
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 6:51 pm
He shrugged as he refastened the couple of buttons he'd undone and turned back to the controls. "I don't know, Charon. I'm still not sure why it even came to be in my possession, but, you know, whatever. I might find out one day if it can be fixed, but then I might not. Just got to wait, I guess."
He cranked back on the speed now, settling the OS down to a lazy 70 mph as they approached a forest. Automatically, the vehicle began to let down it's legs, gradually phasing out antigravity and starting to smoothly walk on the two legs.
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 7:02 pm
"Why did we slowed down? And where are we?" Mark sat up straight, blinking. "Was that a bird?"
Charon smirked at Mark's behavior and looked over at Ocarina. "So tell me.. Whats it like to be a Digital Consciousness?"
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