Hal Henderics

Law rubs his temples. "I'm not going to "turn you into" anything." "I'm going to assume I just didn't explain that part well enough." He picks up the can of the green stuff from before. "This is Green Eco. It is what the Precursors use on any species that is not themselves, for healing wounds, and curing diseases. That includes yours. The Dark Eco is what turns people into "rat people"." "It is the only type of Eco that can do that, and, furthermore, the chances of it doing so even if you took a bath in it are incredibly, improbably small." "Because it is far more likely that, if Dark Eco were applied to any living thing, that they would be unequivocally dead instead." "I'm going to program this Green Eco to remove the malicious functions in your body, leaving you roughly as normal a person as can be expected." "It will then be absorbed into you, and do the job it was set to do, and nothing else. You can stand up or sit down, it won't make any difference." "Is there anything even remotely unclear or concerning about what I just said?" He says, with just the lightest, barest hint of exasperation in his tone.

"So, do you want me to fix the problems buried in your biological makeup, or are we just going to pretend this conversation didn't happen?" Law says, already popping some weird cube cracker into his mouth and typing on his holographic screens again, dismissing all the images he brought up, and turning around in his seat.

Law

"That's the point. We're not supposed to do anything." He rubs his temples with both hands, groaning. "I'm not supposed to do this." He says misleadingly, before clarifying. "Oh man... I'm really not supposed to do this." He pulls up a picture, jerking his hand at it. "You see that?" A picture of another one of those pretty-much-humans. A specific one this time, standing blankfaced with arms out. "That's me." He groans again. "It's SUPPOSED to be me, or, it WAS me? It's what I would have looked like now? I don't know." "What happened to them..." "They just lived. That's it, pretty much. Then, one day, the planet got attacked by everyone who ever lost a tooth via Precursor fist." "We got put on the planet by a bunch of long eared, short nosed rats just in time to land in their garbage." "And I fell in the nastiest pool in the junkyard, and got to be one of them." "Dark Eco is one of six types of Eco. It's purpose is extremely simple, and broad. The purpose of the substance is to record all examples of Precursor Augmentation and Ascension Science. It can be highly explosive or caustic, and, when applied to organic material blindly, typically mutates it beyond recognition. Survival is a matter of luck, when it is not pre-programmed to perform a specific task. Large amounts of it were sealed away before the planet was properly abandoned, but not all of it." He turns around and looks Lucine in the eye. "I don't like the idea of people getting made to do some kind of job. It doesn't really work, even if it wasn't a shitty thing to do." "You don't want to be a cup, I don't want to be the legendary super-rat, whose entire species got made to do this-" He pours some green eco on his hand, where it is simply absorbed. "-safely." "I don't know if I wanted to know the truth..." "I don't know if anyone here is going to hurt me..." "I don't even really know who's responsible for all of this." "But I know too much to go back to the way things were, and that's bad enough for me."

Law scoffs. "This is exactly why I think creating artificial intelligence is just downright dumb." He says, continuing on to interrupt Lucine's obviously negative reaction. "You can't just make people to do things." He says firmly, with no shortage of emphasis on the word "People" He stops typing, staring down with a small look. The pause stretches on uncomfortably, as he thinks hard. "You want to see something?" He says, already bringing up screens, and merging holograms. Before long, he's got a 3D image of an ordinary looking planet floating in front of his scanstave, which he spends long enough staring at to forget for a moment that he was talking to Lucine. Shaking his head, he swipes at some arcane looking runes, and the planet rapidly transforms into a mostly dry, desert covered world. "This is what it looks like when The Prec- My peopl-." "When The Precursors made people to do things. It didn't really work." "Precursors are extremely good at doing things themselves. They can multitask to a degree that anyone else would find impossible. They're GOOD at that. They didn't really need any sort of Sophontry, mechanical or biological. They should have stuck to it." "They got lazy. Precursors aren't able to harness Eco with their own bodies. It makes them act strange. So they figured out a way to solve that problem, without really needing to put in a lot of work." "Abandon an old world of theirs, make some sapient creatures, leave them on that world, and see what evolves out of exposure to their eco and technology. Mostly hands-off." He pulls up a picture of a human. Or at least, what looks almost entirely like a human, aside from the absurdly long elf ears. "This was that species." Law again stares at the picture long enough for the pause to be unusual, thinking about something hard.

Law turns to face her, while typing on two holographic keyboards. His outfit has changed to some kind of silvery fabric robe, while his normal clothing is sitting on a table. Low purple flashes appear near it periodically, like glitter. At the same time, a bowl next to where he's sitting is flashing purple more frequently, as some kind of cube crackers occasionally just pop into being inside the bowl. "Hello, Lucine." He says, his attention on her without any real slowing down of his work.

Law feels a chill settle somewhere on his back, prompting him to roll his shoulders. "That isn't what I asked." He retorts, expanding on that statement. "I asked three questions." "Do you wish you didn't know the facts?" "Do you think any of our allies could hurt you, and get away with it?" "Who do you believe is responsible for altering your body to include a kill command?" Law sees that they plan on using the shooting range, and that she's been reduced to sitting on the ground near-inconsolable, and decides it's time to exercise parts of valor. "I'm going to return to my workstation for now. I've weapons to construct. Find me when you've decided how you choose to answer those questions."

Law pauses. "Would you really have preferred I just didn't explain anything?" Law says, something cold entering his tone. "Do you think I would have gotten away with hurting you, even if I DID have the intention to do so?" "Look. Either your father knows what he's talking about, or he doesn't, and to be honest, I don't really like either of those options." Law says, taking in the implications. "That's really what this is all about." He says inquisitively, with a hint of steel. "You reacted like someone who didn't know something they should have known. Something so important, they could have died from it without knowing why." "Things like kill commands don't make their way into a person's body without someone else knowing about it. So who was it?" "Which idiot, which absolutely incompetent, malicious, and downright evil person decided that a little girl might need to die one day without a say in the matter?" "Which one didn't tell you?"

"I-I was trying to REMOVE those functions y-you dolt, then I hear scrambling and someone running at full-tilt when I turn my back and w-what am I s-supposed to think?!" "A-as f-far as I knew, I was about to be Manchurian Canididate'd by the person who I just found out was maliciously altered!" "Whhat exactly would running away from the WIRELESS scanstave have a-achieved?!" "More importantly, who the heck WOULDN'T want a damn KILLSWITCH taken out?" Law says, rapidly shifting from Afraid to Offended, no longer backing up. "It's insane how unethical it would be for me to have left those unwanted alterations in place!" No small amount of raw emotion makes it's way into his voice as he explains this subject he's clearly emotionally invested in.

Law

Law, who had been walking to the shooting range to check his guns, encounters the towering augmented human and Tim "Oh god don't attack!" Law shouts at the same time, backed up and ready to scramble. "Tim you gotta protect me here, she chased me into the d-damn woods!"

Law

Law

Law

"Worst comes to worst, I can simply have Tim restore it." Law says, shrugging.

"Well, it's not a hardware DEFECT, I've already scoured the whole machine with Light Eco in case there was some corruption from the teleporter element. No dice." Law says. "It's either some quirk of the software, an interaction of the various zeptotech elements, or a property inherent to the Ender Pearl acting as the teleporter element."

"It's far from perfect, I've had to assemble the entire thing from the ground up with nothing but Precursor Metal and Power Cells and whatever else I can scrounge up." He scratches his chin, glaring at the device. "There's a minor bug with the teleporter that steals people's hair and stuffs it into the prints too, so I haven't been able to use the teleprinter functionality to make food like a proper precursor constructor."

"I bet your world's 3D Printers don't do this, Caveman." Law waddles over to Alan's Cyberdeck, waves some kind of magic wand over it, reads the branding printed on the casing and then rapidly types into the Printer, which projects some kind of holographic screen. Eventually, it lights up with purple energy, and something interesting happens, Two Cyberdecks, which look a lot like his own come into existence, seemingly melting into reality with a faint purple glow after a few long minutes. Trying to boot them up, Law is forced to troubleshoot, waving his magic wand over them, and typing on another screen it projects, filled with strange runes and arcane symbols. "W-well, there you go. Two fresh new "Cyberdecks", fresh and waiting for an operating system. Complete with Holographic Projection Screen and Holo-Touch controls."

When Doombot moves over to grab it, Law does something inexplicable that makes it disappear back into his robes. "Well, considering most of my body is enhanced and filled with that very technology, I very well am." He snipes. "Do you even HAVE automated production?" Law says, whipping out a large hunk of technology that looks like a 3D printer.

With what is mere nanometers away from being a full blown scowl, Law whips out a gun nearly as large as a person from nowhere, plonking it onto the ground in front of him. Malicious purple lightning occasionally crackles from within the prongs making up it's barrel. "Is this cute? Huh?!" "How about those chassis's of yours that I built with my own two hands? Are those cute?" He says, gesturing to a good chunk of Alan's drones, which use the bodies Law built. "It's Ok Caveman, you don't need to posture at your betters after you play with their garbage." Law, is by this point, fuming.

Both angry and in the comforting presence of drones, Law snaps back "It's LAW, L, A, W, and I could talk in the first place, even before I augmented myself with technology advanced enough to make your head spin, you outdated hack!" Law shouts. "I deal exclusively in nanotechnology, zeptotech, and PRECISION engineering!" He says, implying that Precise Engineering is something not done by most other engineers.

"W-what? I'm not a mascot!" "And my name isn't "Little Guy", It's L-Law!" Law says, backing up.

Law

Law's Form

'Oh fuck this' Law thinks to himself, trying to scramble out of the room. "NicetalkingtoyouFreyagottagobye"