Sister
The Rooftop Workshop was abuzz with a pleasant atmosphere of activity. A few Afterburn members were lounging on the rooftop segment, rousing slowly after a late night of scouting, scavenging, and running. As dawn crept over the horizon the smog of the city was rising and beginning to crawl up onto the rooftops in this neighborhood; the pollutant runoff of an industrial sector flowed thickly across the streets of this particular slum. A few of the 'burners coughed when the smog rose; some reached for masks, whilst others settled into an adjusted level of comfort as the acidic tang of the air settled over the roof. One man in particular rose to his feet and retched briefly, before seeming to calm as he leaned against the edge of the building to spit the foul taste from his mouth.
Following the smog as it pressed against the building, as if a sentient amoeba testing for chinks in armor, tufts of the foul air rolled into Sister's Workshop. The young girl burst into the room, already wearing a respirator as she emerged from the lower floor of her haunt. In her arms was a large box filled with the scraps of electronic equipment and a few choice pieces of metallic hardware that she could manage to carry on her own. Her hair, sensibly tied back in a working ponytail, was out of her face and a dazzling sense of joy for the day radiated from her even as she worked alone within the place she called home. She took a deep, filtered, breath and paused. She breathed out, hearing the grainy sound of her exhalation as it reverberated against the filtration system of the mask.
Then she giggled and did it again. And again. And once more, finding the sensation of the mask vibrating against her face to be a delightful one that only made her laugh harder, which in turn then caused the sensations to escalate until she was swaying and dizzy from lack of breath. She had to sway over to a workbench and set the box down a little too heavily, a soldering iron bouncing off the table in the process. She jerked back with a small yelp, dizzily swaying from the table as this particular tool fell, and she eyed it suspiciously as it sat on the ground laden with an ominous threat of heat. Tentatively she knelt down and reached for its handle, cautiously lifting it away from the ground and double-checking its power switch.
"--Whew, close one. Saturnine would blow a gasket if I burnt my own lab down." She murmured to herself for, perhaps, the one millionth time in her life since escaping the Spire. She placed the tool back into its slot on her workbench with the gusto of an orphanage matron who has caught a naughty child out after dark, and dusted her hands off on her overalls. Her breathing evened out as she appraised her haul of loot for the morning, and the first rays of sunlight began to filter through her windows along with the smog as she began to organize her salvage neatly upon the long workbench that filled half the floor. It contrasted the facsmile of privacy that the hanging tarps provided her 'personal bedroom' on the floor, or the half-crumbled wall that housed the kitchen, in that the workshop half of this floor was an almost entirely open floorplan with the workbench lining one entire wall of the building and a set of monitors connected to a digital terminal dominated the adjoining corner, with toolboxes and electronics equipment filling the space in the middle of the room to act as a divider between her 'private' life and her 'work' life.
Right as she set the final transistor set on the workbench and tossed the box aside, a commotion arose on the floor above. Her smile, hidden beneath the respirator, faded. Those footsteps sounded frantic. The voices sounded hot. Her hands curled on the workbench in a slow and deliberate grip that dug her nails into her palms. She lifted her head just as a man's face appeared upside down in the window before her.
"Word just came in, Rotor's given up the ghost. 'Parently the news is kicking up a buzz on it. Hotshot's calling in the troops."
His words struck Sister and she let out a small sigh, appearing as if to swoon slightly from the weight of the conversation. The man's eyes widened briefly, revealing the mirrorchrome extent of the cybernetic appendages in full. Sister steadied herself even as he reached through the window for her, and she hastily pushed his hand away.
"Roger, I shall send out a Skynet update to the Cell. Go on then, Dumpster, get out of here. I'll be fine." She shooed at him with her hands even as she turned towards the complex array of computer terminals. Dumpster flashed her a thumbs up, which strangely enough meant he was pointing downwards due to his reversed orientation with gravity, then disappeared back up to the roof in a swift lurch of movement. Sister strode swiftly, shrugging the straps of her coveralls off her arms and pushing the top down to hang around her waist to reveal a crisp white shirt that, as of now, was yet unburdened by the filth of her workplace.
She thrust herself down into her chair and swivelled to face the terminals. She pressed both hands together before her and bent the fingers on each hand deliberately until each knuckle of each finger cracked in a dizzying array of sounds, groaned within her respirator in a pleased manner, then pulled a heavy visor-helmet down onto her head. As the visual feeds of the Afterburn Skynet network filled her gaze her hands began to fly on the keyboard.
"Alright...Boss wants everyone?... Then I'll scatter everyone... Spark, meet Gasoline..."
Saturnine
Mentions: Hotshot (
@TheNoCoKid)
Saturnine was braiding his hair. His fingers moved deftly in a practiced pattern, the lustrous sheen of his white hair flowing into a deliberately manufactured 'messy' fishtail braid. The alternating movements of his hands brought him an aura of introspection and planning as he eyed his prize for the morning. His eyes were drawn to her hands, moreso than anything else. She had rough hands, but as he watched her twist the lid of her thermos open he could note the elegant way her muscles twisted and contracted. The way it brought her forearms into a taut definition. The way they relaxed and brought the thermos to her lips. The way her eyes met his--
The metro crashed past overhead, flickering their eye contact into a broken slideshow of bemused expressions on both sides of the street as the bulk of the machine shattered the first sign of sunlight into the binary of shadow and sun. Every time the light passed over Saturnine it sent the woman into shadow, and this game of glimpsing the other seemed to shatter the ice wondrously. Saturnine's arms fell from behind his head, the braid complete, and with languid movements and careful timing he crossed the street in an athletic burst, leaping recklessly- though quite comfortably- into a dive to avoid the passing bulk of a freight truck. He rolled to his feet just as the light reached the woman that he was, now quite suddenly, standing mere feet from.
Her eyebrow arched. He liked how that framed her tough face. It was early in the morning, but it was clear that for the two of them that their mutual days had started long before this moment. She drank from the thermos again even as Saturnine fell into step beside her.
"You do that a lot?"
Her words were exotic, laden with an accent he couldn't place.
"Only when there's a good reason." He replied swiftly, flashing a dazzling smile. Her laughter was clearly in derision at his charmed words, but it wasn't a bitter or disinterested laugh. "I think the honor of learning your name was plenty good enough to warrant such a small risk."
"Small risk, hm?" She mused. Saturnine watched her hands as they lowered the thermos down, returned the cap to its top, and twisted hard to seal the bottle shut. He watched as they hooked the bottle onto a karabiner on her hip, and the way her right hand rested atop it to stop its sway as she walked. His eyes only rose again when she continued, "You know, most guys stare at...well, basically anything besides my hands."
He smiled at her amusement, a more sincere one than the one prior.
"You have nice hands." He said simply, noting the way her olive cheeks darkened with the compliment. "But if you'd like, I could come up with a few poems about your eyes, and maybe even one about your ears?" He offered, relaxing into the comforts of this conversation.
"You think you're so smooth, huh?" She suddenly shoved him by his shoulder lightly, disjointing their steps. "You seem like the kind of guy who thinks he can get whatever he wants."
"And you seem like the kind of woman who knows what she wants." He countered evenly, twisting to walk backwards at her side. His steps rejoined hers in an even pattern even as he had to react swiftly to match her turn at the end of the block. "And, I think you and I aren't so different."
"Is that so, smooth stranger? Just how is that right?"
"We both desperately need breakfast, a shower, and sleep. I'm thinking that particular order of events sounds quite lovely, don't you?"
He watched as her eyes lightened with her laugh, the way she brought her left hand up to cover her mouth as she laughed. The way her fingers touched her lips.
"Alright, I can do breakfast and we'll see how things go from there."
But he couldn't see her hand anymore. His goggles lit up with an incoming notification, and his gait slowed enough that she managed to pass him by. She halted at the same time he did, turning back to gaze at him quizzically.
"What's up?"
"I'm afraid that we'll have to settle for exchanging names for now, madam." He said with deep regret. "Duty calls."
"Work?" She said wistfully.
"Always." He agreed with a chuckle as he turned to face her again.
"They call me Eesha." She said, now deliberately moving her hand to tuck thick purple hair over her ear. He licked his lips.
"Saturnine. Mind if I ask who 'they' are?" He asked the question even as he pulled his heavy headphones onto his ears. He watched as her lips curled into a smirk. He watched as she tapped at her lower lip with her index finger.
"The ones I like. I walk this path five days a week. Watch out for trucks, Saturnine."
He grinned like an idiot as he turned away and broke into a sprint away from her. His gloved fingers twitched, interfacing with the augmented reality view of his goggles.
"Did you really need to take the call that early?" Sister's voice rose from his messenger satchel.
"I could have gone one thousand years without hearing you flirt like that directly into my ears."He chuckles again, quieter this time, as he undid the strap of the satchel and let Sparky rise from within. His mirth was fading fast, replaced by a strong sense of obligation. His smile did not waver, however, and as the diminutive drone hovered by his head he nodded once.
"Your message said it was critical." He teased.
"Critical, not 'make your sister vomit' critical. I don't think there's anything that could ever happen that would make me want you to answer a call that fast.""I'll always answer for you, you know that."
"Yeah, well, hurry up. Hotshot's calling in everyone."Saturnine leapt at the same moment as his hoverboard roared to life from a nearby alleyway and thrust into motion. He deftly landed upon it and kicked its thrusters into gear, surging into the air as a streak of neon orange light cleft by the tail of his white braid. The wind whipped past his face, flinging his hair into a thankfully controlled chord behind him. He shifted his weight and spiralled around the metro rail to corkscrew above the train, now racing down its length from the facsimile of privacy offered by being above the machine. He knelt onto the board and swept his hand through the display of datafeeds that flooded his HUD.
"...Rotor, I liked him. I knit him those mittens a few weeks ago because he said that he kept getting blisters on his palms when he used that grapple line. I wish he'd have said something, I could have been there."
"You can't save everyone, don't do that to yourself.""Patch me through to Hotshot, sis."
He cleared the news feeds and stomped hard on the back of the hoverboard, launching himself higher into the air and narrowly climbing over the arch of a roadway tunnel that the metro intersected. He twisted into a spiral, hugging himself to the board, and 'bounced' the thrusters off the top of a taxi that was caught in a deadlock of traffic. He surged upwards and rose as a blur along the face of the buildings until his board was sailing over the rooftops, unimpeded by any further obstacles for the time being. When he saw the notification of his communications reaching out for Hotshot, he set his expression into a relaxed smile.
"Alright Hotshot, how are we doing this?"
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