The "Nudge" Gun

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---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 08:54PM CST >----------------------
Arcee is heading through the Decagon toward Prowl's office, datapad in hand. Prowl hasn't summoned her, but she likes to drop in on him unannounced anyhow; it makes her feel a bit like she's checking up on /him/, rather than the other way around. Besides, she figures, the chances are rather good that he has an assignment with her name on it after all that's happened recently.
As she arrives at Prowl's office door (the one with no nameplate, what a strange mech he is), Arcee rings the door chime and waits rather than barging in. She'll barge in on Magnus, but she tries not to do that to Prowl.
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 09:00PM CST >----------------------
The door opens for her as soon as Prowl has heard the signal and seen who was out there. He's sitting at his desk, looking busy as usual, with several piles of datapads and disks, though they are nicely stacked and appear to be organized. "Yes Arcee, what is it?"
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 09:07PM CST >----------------------
"Oh, just making sure you haven't vanished under a pile of assignments," Arcee deadpans with a smirk, having a seat across from him so as not to directly disturb Prowl's routine. "Things went well with the Forge infiltration the other night. I was thinking that things weren't going to go so well, but they were alright. Maybe I misjudged Quickswitch's stability, he did well."
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 09:10PM CST >----------------------
"He could have been better, but yes, he did fairly well." Prowl replies absently, scrolling through some more reports. "The fact that half of those sparks we recovered outside of Vos were stolen is unsettling, however. We need to find a way to track them down and re-appropriate them."
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 09:16PM CST >----------------------
"Absolutely, but where can we even begin with that?" Arcee asks, shaking her head. "The more...well, conventional methods of doing that might be easy to foil or reverse, and then we'd be back to step one."
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 09:28PM CST >----------------------
Prowl looks up from his work at her, his expression mostly neutral but at the same time perhaps there is just a hint of curiosity. She's really the only one who comes to see him like this. As in, without any specific purpose or because she wants something from him. "They will have to find some sort of cryo-containment facility or build one themselves if they want to keep them for any sigificant period of time. Unless they're planning on drilling them into bodies immediately. But I doubt they have the resources to do that at the moment."
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 09:38PM CST >----------------------
"Depends on how desperate they are to put them to immediate use," Arcee speculates, settling a bit more comfortably in the chair and crossing one leg over the other. "They may have other plans that don't require as many resources...I'd hate to speculate, but this could be a war crime in the magnitude of something Shockwave would create in a lab."
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 09:50PM CST >----------------------
Prowl nods, standing up and walking over to a window on the east side of the room. It looks out over Iacon, the city glittering below. Amazing really how quickly it had bounced back after the battle. "Arcee, if you could end this war quickly, right now, before it destroys more lives, would you?" he asks suddenly.
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 09:55PM CST >----------------------
Arcee stares across the room at Prowl in surprise. What a strange question! "Well, I think the only possible answer is 'yes, absolutely'," she answers. "If the alternative is more suffering, more deaths, more ruined and traumatized mechs...then why not end things quickly, it wouldn't make sense to carry this on indefinitely."
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 10:04PM CST >----------------------
Prowl turns toward her. "At -any- cost? Whatever it took?" he asks. "Even if it meant sacrificing a few for the sake of the many?"
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 10:09PM CST >----------------------
Arcee begins to get an uneasy expression. "...Well, wait. Which 'few' are we talking about, here? Because technically, this war could end pretty quick with a mass exinction event, but that wouldn't benefit anyone. It /would/ end the war, though. I wouldn't really want to weigh those philisophical questions. Who's expendable? Are...are you? Am I? Is Pax -- er, I mean, Prime? Who's life is more or less valuable than anyone else's? What if we decided by unanimous vote, and it turned out to be the wrong decision because one of those 'sacrifices' could have been the key to ending the war in a more equitable way?"
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 10:24PM CST >----------------------
"Well of course, a mass exctinction event comes pretty close to defeating the purpose of ending the war." Prowl replies, walking back over to his desk. "But if you could sacrifice 1 individual for the sake of saving ten more, to prevent all 11 from perishing, you would do it, wouldn't you?"
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 10:30PM CST >----------------------
Arcee still doesn't look particularly comfortable with the concept. "I don't normally take odds into account, but in this case, when so much is at stake, if the odds were extremely favorable -- and I mean, an extremely /low/ margin for error -- only if the odds were /excellent/ that such a sacrifice would actually work, would I take that chance."
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 10:39PM CST >----------------------
"Assuming the odds of the solution working are 100% then, you would take the chance." Prowl states, walking around to the front of his desk and leaning slightly on the front of it.
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 10:41PM CST >----------------------
"Yes, I suppose I would," Arcee finally admits begrudgingly, still watching Prowl as he comes over to stand near her at the front of the desk. She doesn't go on to ask why he wants to know, because she has a feeling in the pit of her spark that she's about to find out whether she asks or not.
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 10:47PM CST >----------------------
"Good." Prowl gives her an approving look. "I'm glad my confidence in your ability to make difficult, yet necessary decisions has not been misplaced." He goes back behind the desk, and starts to busy himself with something...
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 10:52PM CST >----------------------
Arcee is quiet for a while, leaving Prowl alone to get through his pile of missives and backlogged reports.
However, she remains in the office. Arcee gets up, walks over to the window, and stares down at Iacon with thoughtful contemplation.
After a while, she looks back at Prowl. "How much work you have to get through, there?"
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 10:58PM CST >----------------------
"An unending flow." Prowl replies vaguely. "But that's the drill." He picks up a datapad, and hands it to her. It's a schematic for some kind of weapon, but it appears to not be designed to fire any kind of physical ammunition or photon stream.
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 11:01PM CST >----------------------
Arcee peers at the weapon (or weapon-looking item) curiously. "What's this, is it one of Wheeljack's projects?"
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 11:08PM CST >----------------------
"No, actually." Prowl shakes his head. Wheeljack would probably love to get his hands on it, though. 
"I'm still in the process of figuring that part out myself. It appears to fire something more like a signal than any kind of actual ammunition. I found it in one of the Senate's old armories underneath what used to be the Primacy Auditorium, and transferred the prototypes and files to the Decagon."
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 11:18PM CST >----------------------
"Hm. Do you think it might have...oh, I don't know, ...something to do with the vamparc ribbon?" Arcee wonders. "Actually, the technology itself looks even older than that, doesn't it. Looks like it's something that might need identification through archival means, especially if it predates anyone around here who might be able to remember."
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 11:22PM CST >----------------------
"Unfortunately, there aren't many around who could remember it, given it was higly classified and only accessible by officials among the top tiers of the system." Prowl replies, opening a compartment behind his desk and pulling out something that looks similar to the weapon in the diagrams. "This is the most recent prototype."
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 11:29PM CST >----------------------
Arcee's optics widen with surprise as she actually sees the prototype. Now, the conversation that she had with Prowl just a short time earlier is beginning to concern her. A lot. She still doesn't fully grasp /what/ that thing is, or what it's capable of doing, but she's pretty sure it was locked away for a reason. "It...it probably signals nothing, or whatever it signalled is now long since obsolete. Really, it's old technology is what it is," she says dismissively.
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 11:35PM CST >----------------------
Prowl shrugs. "I don't know what it signals, that's why I want you to find out." he says, pushing the weapon toward her. It looks mostly like a typical small arms type handgun, perfectly fashioned to conceal its true purpose. "And once we've figured out what the 'default' is, we may be able to learn how to modify it for our purposes."
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 11:40PM CST >----------------------
Arcee sighs, and takes the prototype. "Alright, I'll try and get to the bottom of it..." She isn't going to fire it indiscriminately; Primus only knows what weird signal it's sending, and what's on the other end to receive said weird signal. "Pretty sure I can find out the purpose of this thing with a little research..." And an archival buddy or two. Maybe she could interest Rewind into locating the origins of this lost signaller.
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 03 11:49PM CST >----------------------
Prowl shakes his head. "I don't just want to know what the records say it's supposed to do. I want to know what it -actually- does." Because there may well be a disrepancy. An intentional one. "Test it on a Decepticon or Decepticon sympathizer, and report back to me with the results."
There's a chance he already has an idea of what it is meant to do, and he's just not telling her about it. "Oh, and of course, keep this under wraps." Because that's just a given. If it was classified before, there was probably a good reason for it, at least according to him.
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 03 11:55PM CST >----------------------
Arcee just gives Prowl a long look, before returning the prototype to subspace. Was this his way of testing her? Maybe the prototype did nothing but signal *him* when she actually got around to activating it -- so he would instantly know that she tried it out and 'passed' the test.
Or maybe she was just thinking too much into this. Prowl was too busy to play games. Right?
"I'll let you know what it does. Or what it doesn't. Whichever," she mentions.
---------------------< Prowl Posed on Dec 04 12:04AM CST >----------------------
It could be a little bit of both. Probably is. Prowl -does- want to find out what it actually does, even though he already has an idea of what it will probably do.
"Good." he says flatly. "I knew I could rely on you, Arcee. And I hope that will continue to be the case."
---------------------< Arcee Posed on Dec 04 12:16AM CST >----------------------
Arcee watches Prowl for a long moment. She finds him fascinating at times, not just because of his personal eccentricities (really, who doesn't decorate an office?), but because he's such a complicated mech to understand. Just when she thinks she's beginning to understand him, he'll surprise her.
Take care, I'll see you soon," Arcee says, and she heads out with the prototype in her possession. She's already decided when and where she's going to test it out, or at the very least, she has some good idea.
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