2012-10-23 Shovels and Shirtnanigans

Immediately below the control room is over two thousand square feet of lab 
 and shop space. Half of the space is dedicated to biochemical work. There are fume hoods, 
 work benches, fridges, a deep freezer, autoclaves, an assortment of chemicals 
 in lockers, collections of glassware, and everything one would find in a general 
 teaching lab. In addition to that, there are two hulking, intricate-looking 
 machines installed near the far end of the room. A close look at the fine print 
 on the machines suggests that they're some kind of advanced analytical technology.The shop section is equipped for creating more equipment, working metals, 
 repairing delicate machinery, and even working glass. There are long workbenches, 
 a small modern forge, crucibles and kiln for working glass, and racks and racks 
 of tools. The lighting in here is excellent. This is not a large area for advanced 
 experimentation but it is ideal for a general technology maintenance shop.
For once, Aura's hair isn't /everywhere/; she's got it all in one thick loose braid down her back. She's also not in costume, what the hell. She's still wearing the damn mask, but it's with a pair of skinny jeans and a Threadless t-shirt that has glow-in-the-dark Tron kirbylines on it. Because she is in fact More Hipster Than Thou. In one hand she has a ham sandwich, and in the other-- air. More properly, the other hand's outstretched over what looks, to her, like an alien engine block; she's pretending she's a jack, keeping it lifted. "What does it /do/, anyway?" she asks, mouth full, back of her hand keeping sammich from falling out.
 
"Not entirely sure. It might be part of an accelerator for the system they were using to create a dimensional rift in the basement." Sam gestures for her to swing it over to a cradle of scaffolding at one end of the lab. "No matter what it is, it's one of the only intact things we could find in the lower levels. Looks like it got blown right up through a rent in the floor." 
Sam sits down on a stool and glares at it as though he can stare it into revealing what it does. "The alloy looks interesting." He taps the stump of a power conduit. "If there's anything left of what it was, we might be able to work out what it did. Or use it for something else. If there's an engine, there's a machine it'll run. Just might have to build it."
 
"You... had a dimensional rift in the basement. I mean, not you personally. Unless it was still there when you moved in." So many qualifiers for one disbelieving statement! Aura moves the engine as indicated, delicately lowering it into the cradle and making sure it's as down as it's gonna get before she lets go. Then it's just a matter of sitting crosslegged in the air and coming up abreast of Sam, philosophically regarding that upon which he glares. She leans her elbows on her knees, turning what's left of her sandwich around in her hands. "I wish I could tell you what it's made of. All I can tell you is that it doesn't have any ferrous content, but it's obviously conductive. Which isn't very useful. Probably. Actually I have no idea, is that useful?"
 
"Might be," Sam says, brightening up. "If you can tell what else feels like the same stuff." He runs a hand through his hair and sighs, going gloomy again without warning. "I'm not smart enough for this. I mean, I'm not even a little bit smart and this stuff is a job for smart people. It took me long enough to get some of the Silo diagnostics right and I had an instruction book for that. Still." 
Sam pushes to his feet and walks around the engine. "Guess I'm here. I was thinking if you could recognize any of the same metal, we could at least collect the parts. I got the analyzer working in here... I can take a look at the content. If the mechanics aren't useful, the metal might be. It must be pretty damn strong. Do you know what vibranium feels like?"
 
"Not off the top of my head-- do you have a sample? I mean I've never met Captain America, so, no on the shield," notes Aura, sounding interested because she's not paying attention to how she sounds. But Sam, oh Sam, is no doubt used to this by now. She gets down off her invisible chair and trails after The Guthrie, lifting off the ground again to peer over his shoulder. Her sandwich, she leaves on a workbench that doesn't have any nanites. "Plus, don't even talk about not being smart enough, you're smart enough I have no idea what you're talking about most of the time, and I'm not an idiot." She's not! She's unbraiding and rebraiding the end of her braid compulsively, but she's not an idiot. 
"We had some but we sent it back so that we wouldn't get nuked by Vulcan Forge, who produces alloys with it. But there's samples, a few artifacts of it even, in the Wakandan Embassy. It's just very useful against one of the leaders of the group who used to hold thie base." Sam is crouched down, head tilted to look under the piece of equipment. "This is only part of it. I think it's some kind of bypass or overflow, not an accelerator. It'd have some ferrous content if it were being used in an accelerator. Makes sense why it ended up two floors up after the rift blew." 
Sam pauses and turns to look at Aura, flashing her a smile. "I'm not that bright, I just listen when smart folks are talkin'. And I hang out with a lot of smart folks. This here might actually have a smidge of vibranium in it, so I'll see about running a sample. You want to go downstairs and have a look around? Might get you to move some of the beams that collapsed down there."
 
For once a quick, bright, real smile: even the blank white lenses of her mask narrow into little half-moons, as Aura drops to the floor again and lets go the end of her braid. "Wilco. I'll actually just start with that, I can shore up the load-bearing rubbish so it's safer anyway. Less like a dead mineshaft." She's already to the door before she pauses and turns partway, looking back. "Um. Is there anything liable to explode on me down there? Just so I know."
 
"Well, there was the undead telekinetic telepath," Sam says, deadpan. "It's why I locked down the lift shafts and locked off the doors under the third floor. I'll go down with you. Diagnostics only looked for signs of life before but I tweaked them to look for motion after that." He stands up, pulls out his backup phone--his usual phone seems to be MIA--and taps something in. "There. Took the motion sensors offline so we don't start an emergency lockdown." He gestures toward the stairs down to the training level. "Shall we?"
 
"...undead-- you know, I don't even want to know," says the girl, eyes a little wide; she tugs at her braid and then waits for Sam to catch her up, then jams her hands in her pockets as they head off downstairs. "I'm not /afraid/," she points out totally unnecessarily. "Being afraid of monsters and bombs is like being afraid of the dark. Kind of silly. Kind of silly and definitely counterproductive. /Telepathic/? Projective or receptive? I don't want projected undead squick cluttering up my mind..."
 
"Both. It was a little crazy at the time, not really... all there." Sam goes down the stairs ahead of her to the training level where he stops and unlocks a heavy hatch bolted over the opening to the lower levels. It's obviously something that was added later, the hatch cut out of what looks like it could be floor material. "Being afraid is normal, avoiding them is counterproductive." Sam flips the heavy hatch back easily. "Watch yourself. The next levels are not only full of debris, there'd no floor in the center of levels four and five. Six is where we found the undead guy." 
It really is a wreck down here. The layers of dust aren't from neglect, they're from pulverized... something. Lockers and twisted lab equipment have been pushed aside and, sure enough, there's a hole in the floor--clumsily widened and smoothed out.
 
"I can't /imagine/ why it was crazy," mutters Aura, lifting her feet off the floor and gliding as soon Sam says to watch herself. She splays her fingers out, drifting through the door; her voice is distracted once most of her attention is on her extra sense. "Bleh. Remind me to take some excedrin the next time I come down here, the magfields are twisted still, from whatever blew up. Is this masonry dust? We should probably wear breathing masks down here--" Which, for now, she's dealing with by pulling off her t-shirt and tying it around the lower half of her head. Sadly her underwear probably covers more in that area than her costume. Finally she starts carefully moving metal debris, making sure she doesn't shift anything holding anything big up. "Who was in here?"
 
"Group called AIM. Advanced Idea Mechanics. General bad guys. Weapons specialists, all that. Don't think it's masonry dust, but you're probably right. Anything really dangerous we likely can't see though. Rift leeches and..." Sam squints and shakes his head as he catches something out of the corner of his eye. Whatever it was, it's not Aura. It's like he's immune sometimes. To everyone. "...anything extradimensional that got stuck when we collapsed the whole thing. I'd like to reclaim these floors for workspace."
 
For some reason, Aura kind of got that. About Sam. There's nothing particularly licentious about her shirtnanigans, though, just a reasonable fear of breathing problems later. "Rift leeches? I think I saw those on Torchwood once--" the girl says absently, stretching her senses even further than her manipulation, making herself aware of every joint, every seam, every agonized twist of metal, every stress point. "--and just as a warning, this is probably going to get more wrecked before it can get fixed. The structural integrity's laughable. If it were all metal I could just /fix/ it, but there's a lot of cracked and broken building material. Is any of it radioactive? If not, I'd like to be able to at least temporarily dump some of this crap outside."
 
"You can move it all out. The silo sheath and walls are intact, according to our scans, those are all metal. Anything inside them is added on afterward. That includes the floors, which are my main concern right now. I'm not sure why they did the wall work, I guess rich people don't think about this stuff. This was probably a dance hall or something before AIM put in the labs." Sam drops down into the hole in the floor. "I'm just going to make sure we're all outta undead down here."
Oh NOW she sounds MUCH more cheerful. "WILCO, BOSS!" she hollers down the hole, and what follows above is a truly impressive amount of racket and a fair amount of dust and pebbly junk sifting downward. Hell, she even starts whistling. It sounds Dear Jessie, oh Rollergirl oh. It probably is. The screech of metal, the crumbling of concrete, little pops and pows-- since there's not currently an easy way out, she's building herself a giant scoop thing out of girders and plating and lockers and broken lab equipment to hold all the rubble she can shovel. Every so often, she -does- pause to listen for the sounds of sudden combat from below.
 
Not much different than Sam shovelling what he can out with shields. One does what one can. Sam soars back up a moment later and watches the process. "When we're cleared out, can you..." He gestures around the hole. "...you know, smooth that off and put up a rail? I don't know how fancy you can get."
 
"I can get pretty fancy, but I'm not very artistic," Aura says dubiously, glancing back at Sam. "It'll be a solid rail, but probably kind of fugly. Unless you *like* Mad Max Nouveau." She looks up at the Bucket O' Junk, makes a sort of twisting motion with her hands like she's giving someone's arm snakebite, and the bottom and side of it smooth out somewhat with a groan. Then she dismantles the girders she'd been using as a shovel, ripping one apart with the popping of bolts -- which do /not/ ping around like deadly superballs -- and starts to curl it around into a circle. "But safety first. No more zombie telepath poltergeists?"
 
"We're clear. I think we're even clear of soul-sucking rift leeches." Sam grins as he watches her work. "That's somethin' else, I tell you. I get why those registration people are afraid of us." Because he's completely harmless. Like a golden retriever puppy... granted, that's his personality most days, but still.
 
"So do I," Aura replies, almost too quietly to hear in the middle of the metal-bending. "They should worry more about raising their kids right. Loving them. I can understand fear, sure." As she speaks, and as the work she's doing gets finer and finer, her voice gets louder and the metal-sounds get quieter. She's treating steel like it's potter's clay, manipulated by giant invisible waldos. Smooth the edges of the hole out first, while the rail-top is leaning against the waall over there. "I can even understand a violent reaction to having fear. But-- I don't understand a gut reaction of hate and revulsion. I hope I never do."
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