[open] I need to learn to let go of the past

[tr1xx]

Who: Cammie & you!
What: Cammie dealing with some grief whilst trying to pretend she isn't and going about her routine
Where: Sleigh Room, communal relaxation area, training room, kitchen
When: December
Warnings/Notes: Inevitable discussion of child soldier stuff, mentions of climate disaster, discussion of child death, definite discussion of family death, other warnings in subject lines. (Obligatory note that Cammie's HoH/Deaf, her rabbit ears are her hearing aids.)



Sleigh Room

To most people, the way Cammie continues to throw herself into working on her Holon will probably seem like nothing but than a teenager with a good work ethic. Whenever she's out of basic maintenance tasks—and she is constantly finding more of those to add to the weekly routine—she's working on the jerry-rigged computers so she can better access her systems without being uploaded. Hardware, software, all of it.

But to people who know her better, or perhaps to people who do the same thing, Cammie is clearly distracting herself.

This isn't her favourite time of year. Not anymore.

Alright, it was never actually her favourite. Winters in Scotland were harsh things, all the years she lived there—deadly things, sometimes, with the way the polar vortex was breaking down—not the kind of snow you could play in. But there was joy in the holidays, anyway. The five years where all six members of her family were at home were good years. And then the twins died. And then her Mam. And then her dad. And then it was just her and her Gran until she got herself arrested and ended up in America.

They don't know exactly when her Gran went, too, but it was around this time of year and that hardly improved things.

So, Cammie does what Cammie does best: she buries herself deep in her work so that she doesn't start thinking about all the bad stuff. Never a foolproof plan, but good enough.

Visitors may or may not be noticed, depending on how deep in her hyperfocus on work she is at the time, but those who do get noticed without extra effort might be asked:

"Y'mind handing me that socket wrench?" or "Be a pal and toss me up those crisps?" or the like.

Training Room

There is a giant, mechanical rabbit in the training room. It's not an uncommon sight, actually; anyone who frequents the training room will have seen it in action at least once by now. Cammie's up here whilst uploaded just as frequently as she is in her human body, if not more.

She's yet to take the mech out on a mission. She feels... rusty. And so, she practices.

Leaps and flips and boosting herself so she can skate along the walls. Practising her aim, since her drones aren't functioning quite right just yet. Seeing how much of an advantage the mech gives her when handling the fearling swarms and getting covered in the red paint for her troubles.

If you look past the mech, you might spot the young Scot's flesh body tucked safely in a corner. For all intents and purposes she appears to be asleep; like she sat down against the wall and dosed off. Were it not for the mech, the only giveaway of anything unusual going on would be the small node attached to her temple: a white circle with tiny bunny ears protruding from the edge, and green blinking lights within it.

Communal Relaxation Area

Sat in front of a fire in a nest of pillows and her back against a couch, Cammie is fiddling with what appears to be a small robotic toy. Something a little more simplistic than the kind of thing she'd make back home, but not entirely dissimilar in its design principals to Nugget, who is paying very close attention to what his human is doing.

Every time she sets it down to pick something else up, the little guy keeps 'sniffing' it, or tapping it with one of his tiny feet. Cammie shakes her head at him. "Buddy. C'mon. You've got bloody nothin' to be gettin' all jealous about, I'm not replacin' you. Just pitchin' in with some toy ideas for the wee kiddies. I'd've loved gettin' somethin' even a little like you as a kid."

So would Maisie and Fergie, she's sure, but they hadn't got the money for all the best gadgets back then. Nugget was a personal project, and so were her ears. It was only after Mam and Dad were both gone and she dropped out of school to hack full time that she got all her best equipment.

Pulling a face, she visibly shakes the thoughts off and gets back to fiddling.

Kitchen

It's late. It's really late. Cammie's sleep schedule hasn't improved at all on this third leg of her multiversal journey, because why would it? The disruption of her routine is more than enough to set her back again each time and frankly, she's rarely made much progress in shaking the habit in the first place. Nightmares, workaholic tendencies, and good old fashioned poor choices have always been her frenemies.

It's more than that right now, though.

Cammie is attempting to make hot chocolate the old fashioned way, on a stove in the kitchens. She has all the ingredients and tools she needs, and she's already got a batch on the heat. She's never done it before, not properly. But this was how her Gran always used to make it, ever since she was just a wee babe. Cammie watched her do it so many times it's burned into her memory, and thanks to gen:LOCK she can go back and view those memories with unnatural clarity. She knows how to do it. In theory.

It still doesn't feel like it'll taste the same.

God, she misses her. She misses all of them. Mam, Dad, Gran, Maisie and Fergie—why is it just her still alive? Why did her Gran have to go and be so stubborn and get herself—

One rabbit ear twitches towards the sound of someone else in the room. Cammie scrubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand and swallows, so she can sound like she has her shit together. "Makin' more than enough for two, if y'fancy a mug."

Wildcard!

Totally down for other things. I can be found at bluecitrine.

Comments

Kitchen

[hallelujahjunction]

Dan, like Cammie, has workaholic tendencies when he's stressed, and lately he's been going on as many expeditions with Bunny as he can to stay in the field. Dan's skills these days in this setting mostly tend towards damage control, to providing emotional support to people who've just survived attacks from the supernatural and to tying up loose ends, and that means that he's taken on so much of other people's emotions that he doesn't have much time for his own. That's how he likes it. He doesn't want to think about this time of year or the next month. He just wants to sink into harry and hustle until February.

When he hasn't been out in the field, he's been making gifts for people and partying, which, thankfully, is easy to do at this time of year, what with mistletoe and jingle bell rocking and partridges in pear trees. He's been working hard and therefore drinking hard, and after at least one Christmas shindig a yeti has had to carry him home after he fell asleep behind a Christmas tree, wrapped in tinsel and covered in glitter.

It's completely thrown off his sense of time, which means that he's waking up and stumbling to the kitchen for coffee by the time Cammie's making hot chocolate. He rubs his eyes and shuffles over to the window to crack it so he can vape.

"In fact, I do." Dan can read Cammie's body language even when he's half-asleep and hungover, and he can tell she's upset, and that makes him want to stay near to her. He holds his vape up and waggles it. "Will it bother you if I have some nicotine while I wait for the cocoa?"

[tr1xx]

Cammie shakes her head, giving the pot another stir. "Nah, knock yourself out. I've got the smell 'a meltin' chocolate blastin' me in the face, I ain't gonna smell a thing comin' from you."

As is in her nature, she's perched in an odd crouch on the stool she pulled up so she didn't have to stand the whole time she was doing this. Her PJs are baggy and comfortable, and she has bunny slippers on.

She couldn't hide how exhausted and out of sorts she is from Dan if she tried, and by now, she knows it. So maybe she doesn't try quite as hard.

[hallelujahjunction]

"Mm. Wish I hadn't done wrecked my sense of smell with smoking. Melting chocolate sounds nice."

He vapes and exhales out the window, letting the familiar wave of nicotine in his lungs flush out the sleepiness like cobwebs. His head hurts, he's nauseated, his back hurts, but he wiggles his toes in his own slippers and rolls his fingers over the corners of the vape and decides that he's still in one piece and that he's going to take that as a blessing. It's not the worst morning he's had, or whatever time this is now that he's awake.

He takes a few hits off the vape before shuffling over to the cabinet to throw together some Irish coffee. He doesn't look right at Cammie, trying to give her her space and time to adjust to him being in the room with her before he tries to coax her into opening up.

"Do you want to talk about them?" He doesn't know who she's thinking of, and that's the tragic thing. It could be anyone in her family graveyard, where the deceased are plentiful as flowers. It could be Kazu. It could be another one of her comrades, torn away from her in a little 'update' from her home dimension. Dan just knows that he's looking at grief, because he's seen it so often in his life.

[tr1xx]

The sound of whisking stutters, stops, then starts again as Cammie snorts softly and shakes her head. "Swear it's cheatin' how well you can read me when you've never even been all up in my brain. Y'sure you didnae get some me-specific mindreadin' powers somewhere?"

The joking gives way to a sigh and the whisking stops again. Cammie digs out another mug to join the one she had ready for herself—both obnoxiously Christmas themed, of course.

"...I dunno. Maybe."

[hallelujahjunction]

Dan gives a muted laugh. "I'm just good at reading folks. Survival skill from a life of getting by on the kindness of strangers."

But familiarity has made him good at reading Cammie in particular. They've spent enough time together, bared their hearts enough.

"I ain't going to force you to if you don't want to, just...I know it's a hard time of year for a lot of us."

December is easier for Dan than January, but it still feels like bearing down on a bad stretch that never gets easier, and it's hard not to think of who's missing when there's such an atmosphere of togetherness and joviality. Ghosts press in during the holidays. Absences - voices missing during singalongs, potlucks down a dish, blank spaces at the kitchen table - yawn open.

[tr1xx]

"Yeah," Cammie breathes, carefully taking the pot off the heat. "Sure cannae say it's an easy one. Fuck, I cannae even remember the last time I did Christmas. Before Dad died, maybe."

Even then, for all her dad and gran's efforts to make the day special, it was never quite the same as it was when it was all of them. Then she didn't even let Gran try, after Mam and Dad were gone too. Maybe she should've. Hindsight.

Just as carefully, she pours the hot chocolate into the mugs. There'll still be some left over.

"Not a lotta time for holidays in war, and all."

[hallelujahjunction]

"Ellie and me used to try and make Christmas happen each year. I was bad at it. Usually so drunk I'd sleep half the day or too hungover to function."

He sighs and drums his fingers on the counter. He exposed his daughter to so much more of his issues with addiction than he ever intended to. It always just felt like a gradual creep, sliding into drinking a little more than usual because of the holidays, into letting Ellie take care of him a little more each day until she would put her foot down and point out that she was too young to be the adult between the two of them, and he'd straighten out for a while before they did it all again the next year.

He can be honest with Cammie. She's aware he wasn't an ideal parent. He's certain he isn't the ideal paternal figure now, if that's the best way to describe the relationship he and Cammie have.

"Thank you." He takes the cocoa and sits at the table with his three beverages (he decided to complicate the Irish coffee concept by splitting the Bailey's and the coffee into two mugs). "Is there a Christmas you think of as the ideal Christmas? Some time you remember with all of them?"

[rallieshearts]

"Sure. That bracket before last ain't closed proper, though, might want to do that first." In Rowan's defence, there aren't so many people around that use computers with the same ease that they do. That and, well, they're naturally nosey. Of course they were sneaking a peak.

Leaning back to grab the packet of crisps, their slim figure naturally graceful, and then leaning forward again, they drop them by the side of her keyboard. "What you working on? It ain't nothing I recognise." Their tone is friendly and curious, even if their cockney accent is thick. And they were clearly able to spot that dropped bracket at a glance. Rowan, for one, is quite excited about the concept of someone that they might be able to talk shop with.

[tr1xx]

Oh hey, another Brit. Still never feels like they get half as many of them as they do Americans on these multiversal trips, always kind of a nice surprise.

Cammie squints at her screen and for a moment there's a circle of green light over her iris, as she uses MR to isolate the error more quickly. "Ach, yep, there's the bugger..."

A few quick taps to fix it, and there you go. She sits back on her haunches afterwards, perched as she is in a crouch that's probably only comfortable to her, and grabs the packet of crisps.

"Thanks. And good eye." She rips the bag open. "Alright, so, short answer: control panel for that thing," she jerks her thumb back towards the storey-tall mecha rabbit, "longer answer: I'm basically recreatin' a piece of software originally built in the 2070s from memory, 'cuz my mech arrived all on its lonesome without any of the stuff needed to properly get into its software from the outside. Mixed Reality can do bits, but not all of it; everythin' else I currently gotta be uploaded for. Whiiiich is a whole other explanation."

[rallieshearts]

It looks perfectly comfortable to Rowan. Bisexual sitting, and all of that. They perch on a ledge where they can still peek at her screen, but that they’re also still close enough to her eye line that she doesn’t have to twist too much to see them.

“That’s why I don’t recognise it then, innit. 2020 still, where I come from.” Well this just gets more and more fascinating. Future tech? They’re dying to get their fingers into it. This is much more interesting than all the magic flying around: magic is just that, nothing they can play around with. But tech and code? That’s their job and their hobby.

“Ain’t got nothing like that back home. AR’s been kicking around for a bit but no one’s got it working proper, no mixed reality or nothing.” They’re quiet for a second, rubbing their cheek as they think. “But I do got a way of connecting things what shouldn’t be able to be connected. It ain’t magic, not really, it’s sort of like a gift, and I dunno how it’d work with your fancy stuff, but it might give you a shortcut if you wanna try.”

[tr1xx]

"We've had full virtual reality and MR for as long as I can even remember, I cannae imagine growin' up without it. Best parts of the internet are the VR Ether networks, completely immersive except most sensation."

Think a very, very sophisticated version of VR chat with a much wider scope, used by just about everyone in the world with an internet connection.

The robotic rabbit ears tilt sideways. "Hmm. Micht cud work," she's spent enough time with Dan by now for some of his dialectical quirks to catch up with her sometimes, if with a Scots twist, "far as I understand it we're all runnin' off the same base power source here now, yeah? Might make your thing and my tech more compatible than they might be otherwise. Probably cannae hurt to try. Worst case I just gotta keep at it the old fashioned way."

[rallieshearts]

"Dunno about running off it, half my normal shit ain't doing nothing." Rowan says, but with a chuckle and a playful tilt of their head. It's annoying, not having access to half of their forms, but having access to lupus again lately has made them feel a little more relaxed about it. Maybe it'll just take some time for everything to adjust to whatever it is that's running the show here. Would be nice if they weren't limited to their most useless forms to start with, but it's certainly better than nothing. "But yeah, should make it easier. Better than nothing, innit."

They straighten up for long enough to pull a phone out of their pockets. From the outside it's a perfectly normal 2020-ish smartphone, if a little beaten and battered, and not the latest model, but that's hiding a lot of Glasswalker mods in the jailbroken system. However, this particular trick isn't anything to do with the software or hardware, but tied to the spiritual part of being a werewolf, taught to them by a net spider in the spirit world. Closing their eyes, they focus themself. It's not hard with all of Cammie's advanced tech around to imagine what this place would look like in the umbra, full of net spiders busily starting to fill it full of webs. It's almost too easy to sense what they would, the buzz of electricity, the song of the weaver, and to draw it into their phone.

Opening their grey eyes, they can already sense the successful connection. But it feels different than anything they've connected to before. The connection is there, but her technology is too advanced for their phone to be able to read it. "Anyway to check it on your end? Feels like it worked, but my phone's struggling."

Sleigh Room

[ninjavampire]

Having his head buried in his own project made it easy to miss some of the other Guardians afoot, until the day he was left with nothing to do in his own lab except to wait for a slow-going reconfig to complete itself. So when he finds Cammie at work at another end of the building, he takes the opportunity to approach and be rather suddenly volunteered for some work floor assistance. The suit made him hard to miss.

Miguel does the natural spider-thing to do, which is to light-web the requested object (an angle grinder for metalwork) from its disconnected place on a toolbench and into his palm.

"Cammie, right? I've heard some high praises about you."

He glances over her workstation as he hands it over. It was difficult to tell if he was properly impressed or not by his face alone, but he seems curious about the day's mechanical maintenance.

"I can see why."

[tr1xx]

The centrepiece of her workstation today is a large orange metal box with various metal, sometimes glowing, components inside. It's fiddly looking and Cammie isn't actually doing much with the inner-workings, instead focusing on taking measurements from the casing in service of cutting out additional panels of metal sheeting.

She's half-distracted, at first, but the flash of the light-webs is enough to make her head snap to look at him properly. There's a faint ring of light around her irises, where her Mixed Reality lens implants are active, and her gaze flicks momentarily to the chest of his suit. Oooooh, this guy.

"Lemme guess, has Dan been talkin' me up?" He's by far the most likely suspect around here, even for all that she does have other friends who've made the trip from where they were last together. "And you're Miguel, yeah?"

[ninjavampire]

"The one and only."

Miguel may indulge in a pinch of Spider-Man goofiness from time to time. He makes note of the equipment that was certainly a technology from a futuristic universe. What a sight for sore eyes it is.

"I lead a team in a different end of the multiverse back home. Had some luck trying to put together a machine that can crunch some of the interdimensional math involved in traveling around. Still have a ways to go."

The room-consuming monstrosity in the lab most certainly raised the room temperature by a few degrees, and he hasn't even started trying to make anything that could sustain a portal. He guesses that she may have ran into similar limitations trying to nuts-and-bolts something useful together for the mech's systems.

"Working with the century old technology here makes it a process."

[tr1xx]

"Leader, aye? Yeah, I can see that," said with a rather exaggerated look over. He's got the tough team leader vibe. "More like, ehhh—half a century for me? But fuck if I dinnae feel that, better here than the last place but half the parts I need don't exist unless I fabricate 'em myself and even that's harder without the big 3D-printing wells."

She has no idea how she'll handle the eventuality that a piece of her Holon is destroyed entirely and needs replacement. It's a very 'put out that fire when it starts burning' situation, right now.

"Dinnae even wanna think about messin' around with the internals of this thing." She gestures loosely at the open casing and all its futuristic, glowing bits. "I've done bitsa brain maintenance before, for a friend 'a mine, but I'm still workin' on a way to look at the software let alone the hardware."

She sits back a bit, stretching her hands out. This is one of the rare times she's not in her crouched position, but she does have her legs crossed. "Interdimensional math sounds like a real bloody doozy. You gotta be pushin' some of that equipment to its limit."

[ninjavampire]

The vibe is very much that. Miguel is trying to get a sense of her abilities and what she's comfortable with. He can't help but be reminded of Peni working on her machine, once she learned to the repair the armor by herself.

"It may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but the magic the yeti have on hand is worth investigating. It can bridge the gap in technology - for the hardware, at least."

A strange thought at first, but if the magic's properties could be studied and measured... It was no different to any other material or chemical he used in his lab. Even if it operated under slightly more arcane and chaotic rules than nanotech.

"What are you trying to do?"

[tr1xx]

"Not as crazy as it should sound, actually. Magic's already all up in the workings of my gear, has been since it got yanked over—it's the way these hops interfere with power levels when your powers are external tech. Just never had the tools to try an' actually make it work for me before."

Back in the Green there was just no way to do anything with the tech that didn't stop working entirely, it's a relief to be in a place where she can actually get her fingers into things again.

"What I'm tryna do right now is reinforce the brain housing, best I can. Last thing I need is some villain or monster we have to fight tearin' into it. The more protection it's got, the more time you lot have to help if I cannae get 'em off for some reason."

[ninjavampire]

"Funny you mention that. I've noticed something similar for my suit."

Aside from the incident with Morales, unstable molecule weave is fairly indestructible. But since he'd arrived here, there'd been a lot of knives and claws and other such sharp things piercing through and forcing it to locally regenerate. Another task on the docket to solve at some nebulous point in the future.

Miguel steps aside to give the Holon a more careful look, putting two and two together when he notices its lack of cockpit, among other things. He glances back at her.

"Brain housing - then you control it remotely. Or does your machine have some level of awareness on its own?"

Less an armor, more an avatar.

[millenyal_pink]

Elle has seen the mech in the training room, but not in action. She's impressed by its maneuverability. Cammie is clearly experienced.

She had come to the training room to, well, train. Her balance is all sorts of fucked up, what with missing more than half of her left arm and all, and it's healed enough that it's time to start the exercises that will help her adjust.

Elle doesn't know if Cammie heard what happened to her on Halloween, but she chooses to just go with it. As the mech performs feats that seem to defy reason and physics, Elle gives an impressed whistle.

"Shit, I've been hearing about it but there's nothing quite like seeing you in action."

[tr1xx]

Cammie lands with digitigrade legs spread to stabilise her for the second before the wheels in the bottoms of her feet retract, then straightens up; only the malleable size of the room saves her from bonking her ears on the ceiling.

"I could play all humble and shite but I'm not even gonna, I am fuckin' awesome like this. Feels so good to be fuck-off tall and metal again."

The thing about being twice as tall as everyone else is that you're working with a very different visual perspective than you usually are. It's not quite as pronounced as it was when she was four-storeys instead of one, but it's still a thing.

Which is why it's only as she crouches down so she's not looming quite so much that her visual sensors actually catch up.

"Still gettin' used to the way the magic's changed it, mind, but—" processing, processing, "—are you missin' your bloody arm?"

[millenyal_pink]

Elle grins at seeing Cammie in her element.

"You look badass as hell."

She's admiring the mech when the question comes. She had-- forgotten. For a moment. She glances down at it, and back up to Cammie's "eyes".

"Yeah, but it's gonna grow back. Not as fast as I'd like but..." she shrugs. She's acting pretty nonchalant about the whole thing.

[tr1xx]

"Fuckin' hell. Was that from the mess on Halloween?" It didn't completely pass her by that Elle was absent for a while following everything with the witches, but the deeper into November they got, the deeper into her work Cammie threw herself, until the critical mass of grief hit in December.

So she wasn't exactly the most sociable herself.

"'Least it's gonnae come back, but— shit. That had to hurt." She's know, in her own roundabout way—she's had limbs ripped off in the Holon more times than she can count, though that's also why... "S'pose I'm the last person around here who can say shite about how chill you're actin' about it right now, mind you."

But it is being noted.

cw: mentioned self-injury

[millenyal_pink]

Elle snorts, because the pain really was the least of her problems.

"Didn't hurt too bad. Managed to make a clean cut at a good angle, had a tourniquet, and it wasn't left unattended for long." If you can call an old, suspicious-looking cleaver "clean", or a belt wrapped tightly around her arm a "tourniquet".

Elle can, so she does.

"Would you believe me if I said this isn't the most fucked up thing I've put myself through on a mission?" Cammie probably would, they've bonded over the fucked up things they've gone through.

What Elle doesn't realize is that she's very much implying she did this to herself. Which she did, but other people may find that part pretty upsetting.

cw continues

[tr1xx]

"Think I'd be pretty surprised if it was the most fucked up thing you've put yourself through, if I'm honest." Given their little talk about the things they've been through, fucked up seems to be the baseline from which things can only escalate. "What the fuck did you walk into that you had to— I'm not playin' a hyped up game 'a leap frog if I say you cut your own bloody arm off, am I?"

It is upsetting, and yet also not entirely unfamiliar—a Holon limb can be trapped, have to be torn free and left behind, but there's no blood or viscera or anything of the sort when that happens. And they always try to avoid it, even if the limb will have to be replaced after anyway.