making this cold harbor now home

[dubiouslychthonic]

Who: Sawbones Jetshard and open!
What: Several around-the-station open prompts, first week of March.
Warnings: Third prompt involves blood and routine medical testing.


A - March 2, Common room, ~1 A.M.

[It's still a little surprising to Jetshard how quiet it is in the middle of the night around here; it's not unheard of for others to be up and around at this hour, of course, but in a troll community the aftermidnight hours would be the busiest part of the day.

Anyway, it feels vaguely antisocial to spend too much time shut up in her quarters, even if her sleeping schedule doesn't seem to coincide with most others', so she's currently camped out in the common room, sitting crosslegged on one of the couches with a large, dense book open in her lap and her tablet computer balanced on one knee. Ever so often, she taps something into the tablet.]

B - March 5, East Residential Hallway, ~7 P.M.

Aw, shit, no...

[The exclamation - more disappointed than alarmed, almost resigned - is accompanied by a faint clatter from inside the open door of Apartment #1. A smallish disk-shaped robot with a largish knife taped to the top trundles out of the room and down the hall toward the kitchen - maybe a bit faster than might be expected of a troll roomba. A moment later, Jetshard follows, stocking-foot and damp haired. She looks both ways at the door before spotting the device and giving chase. Hopefully it hasn't found any ankles yet...?]

C - March 7, Medbay, ~9 P.M.

[Jetshard sits on the edge of a cot in the medical bay, a combination of her own kit and some supplies she's scrounged up in here spread out next to her. She's turned away from the door; although she hasn't bothered to pull the curtains and hide herself from view, she's also kind of sheilding what she's doing with her body as she draws a vial of jade-green blood from her arm.

There's no real reason why she needs to be in here for this, except that there's something comforting about keeping medical things to the medical bay. It feels... safer somehow. Less vulnerable.]

Comments

March 2

[founderinglight]

[By now, Jetshard has probably become aware that the sleeping habits of humans (well, okay, chiefly one human) are not nearly as potentially sleep-violent as trolls.

Which is to say, guess who was napping on the couch across the common room, long legs peaked over an armrest and a blanket over his shoulder?

Yep.]

Mmmmnnn...

[The blanket shifts, Izunia shoving it back with one arm as he starts to sit up. A series of sleepy blinks follows, and then he gives Jetshard a sleepy little wave.]

'Morning.

[dubiouslychthonic]

[She looks up from her reading, glances at the clock readout on her tablet screen, and chuckles.] Still a few hours off from that, by most people's estimation, I think?

[founderinglight]

Diurnal cultural greeting, my dear, don't be so literal.

[Properly sitting up, now, and... pulling a steaming cup of coffee out of his Armiger. Success!]

[dubiouslychthonic]

Ah.

[She turns a page, although her attention's not entirely on her reading now; the play of light as he pulls the coffee out of apparently nowhere catches her eye.] I was starting to wonder if everyone else here was limited to what they could carry in their physical pockets.

[founderinglight]

Hardly.

[He takes a nice long drink from the mug, sliding his knees off the armrest to sit something resembling properly on the couch.]

I know a few of the younger group have something similar - it just seems that most aren't as casual about it as I am about my Armiger.

[dubiouslychthonic]

[She shrugs.] Sylladices are pretty ubiquitous where I come from, but people here keep being startled when I captchalogue or retrieve something from mine.

[founderinglight]

It's exclusive to my family and sworn retainers of such on Eos; I can't speak for anyone else, but my impression is that it is probably even less common there.

[He shrugs in return, a halfway grand gesture for the arm that isn't holding a coffee mug.]

Not common enough to have any particular terminology for it, certainly.

[dubiouslychthonic]

Every child on Alternia uses a sylladex, although not generally to very good effect. [The gimmick fetch modi. Mothers help her, the gimmick fetch modi.] Yours seems to function a little differently, though. Most fetch modi display at least a portion of the inventory while the user interacts with it.

[founderinglight]

Mmm, no, the Armiger doesn't display any contents except under an extremely small handful of highly specific circumstances. I can figure out what's in there with some concentration, at least, otherwise I might have had some serious difficulties upon arriving here.

[Armiger modus is just a very sparkly Array, tbh.]

[dubiouslychthonic]

Does it have a technological basis, or...? [A perigee ago, that would have been a ridiculous question, and she's still not sure how to word it in a way that doesn't make her sound like a credulous child.]

[founderinglight]

No, entirely magical. Gods-granted to our bloodline in exchange for defending the crystal and someday purifying the scourge of the star, and so on.

[Something about the way he say that is quite bitter.]

[dubiouslychthonic]

And the sylladex's space-folding is entirely generated by a machine, so I'd presume that the two function differently...

[founderinglight]

Indeed, seeing as - as far as we've been able to tell - the Armiger doesn't actually have anything to do with space. It's some kind of matter to light conversion, probably.

[dubiouslychthonic]

I suppose that makes the same kind of no sense at all that... any of this makes, really.

[founderinglight]

Surely your species' understanding of physics has at least covered matter to energy conversion? Same principle, except in this case the energy is stored instead of being released. Light's just the medium of energy.

[He takes the pillow from where his head was resting, shakes it out a little, and passes it into the Armiger with a flurry of blue lights to demonstrate.]

It gets a little more complicated when you get into the matter of the Royal Arms and other such things, but that part's straightforward enough.

[dubiouslychthonic]

We're familiar with it in the context of "if there's a way to release enough energy to raze an alien city, our scienterrorists have probably investigated it." And I mean, I'm a physician, not a physicist, but it seems to me that even if you can store the energy it would be another matter entirely to put it back the way you found it afterward.

[founderinglight]

Which is probably why it's at least in part tied to the ability to actually recall the items in question. If you want the truly inexplicable part, the Royal Arms can exist in multiple Armigers concurrently - it's even possible to use two versions of the same arm against each other.

[dubiouslychthonic]

...honestly, I still think it's stranger if you can't instantiate multiple copies of other items, if it's a matter of energy-to-matter conversion to produce stored items. But I suppose that can probably be put down to "magic did it."

[founderinglight]

I'd assume that the energy used for each item is still individual somehow.

[For now, he'll summon a cup of coffee - still steaming, with just a little cream. Yes, it appears that he preps his morning caffeine beforehand. That's one way to avoid stumbling around the kitchen in whatever passes for your morning.]