route666rp | [open] test environment

Who: SecUnit and OPEN
What: The husk hatches! This is actually good news.
When: Around the 19th.
Where: In and around the Convoy.
Warnings: Insectoid features, depictions of PTSD, others TBD.

1. Reactivation

[Forced shutdown: restart

failure: retry
failure: retry

retry

restart]

There's something wrong with its eyes. They won't focus, and it's staring at a... something. Wall? It takes a whole 7.9 seconds to determine that the abstract line it's looking at is, in fact, the corner of a room where the ceiling meets the walls. Which feels wrong. It's pretty sure the last time it was stuck like this, the ceiling blended into the wall.

It hopes this isn't like the last time it was stuck like this. It mostly remembers being very fucking bored.

Then the rest of it snaps online, and SecUnit has access to all of its memory files. Which doesn't help, actually, because there's something wrong with its systems. Analysis of visual records indicates that the light coming in through the slatted window and the hints of terrain are distinctly different from the time it shut down, and yet its internal record has no record of how long it's been shut down.

Okay. No need to freak out just yet, even if the situation starts to send prickles through the organic parts of it, and threat assessment is beginning a slow climb. It starts to get off of the bed where it's been leaning back, and promptly fucking overbalances and hits the ground with a crash.

It doesn't move for a second, because this really is like its memory rebuild, and maybe it should just sink into the floor and never move again instead of paying attention to the diagnostic warning it now has unhelpfully warning it that its legs need calibration before use due to extended inactivity and potential obstruction. There's shards of - something on the bed and the ground around it, metal that leaves the remnants of a shell.

One hand and arm is still coated in it.

SecUnit reacts, extremely fucking reasonably by its measure, by punching the hand into the closest wall, it's entire mind a scream of oh shit.

-

2. Around the Convoy

By the time it's gotten its legs working again - and, more importantly, ensured that there's no corruption to its memory archives, SecUnit slips away from the room it's apparently spent the past two weeks in. The Convoy is stopped for the evening, and most of the humans and human-adjacent organics should be handling their meal break, leaving SecUnit the chance to patrol the shields mostly undisturbed. It makes a sweep, aiming ultimately for the weird floating islands that start spiraling up from the ground at the edge of the shields.

It gives the strange glowing plants a wide berth, remembering the weird colored water of the oasis. Threat assessment keeps trying to spike at every unexpected twitch of movement, every unfamiliar noise, flooding its organic parts with stress chemicals, so it's slow going for SecUnit, who's trying not to stop dead and keeps doing so anyway.

It has to start running processes in background, filling its head with three simultaneous floods of data to try and even out the performance reliability that sits somewhere in the low seventies as it does - one analyzing all of the vehicles around it for signs of damage, a second in background playing Sanctuary Moon (Episode 206, which it's paying less that 18% of it's attention to, it's just there for background, and isn't working as well as it would hope at making it feel better), the third plotting a route to ascend to the top of one of those floating islands, all the while it patrols, alert for any signs of monsters. Or worse, people.

And underneath it all; there's no corruption, code analysis comes up clean. Get it together, Murderbot.

[ooc: feel free to use brackets or prose! I'll swap to match. Also if your character has any of the plant effects this month, feel free to have them pick up on what Murderbot here is thinking/feeling.]

Threaded | Flat

The crash of something hitting the floor, and then hitting the wall, draws Sephiroth's attention like an alarm bell going off. The new but ever present undercurrent of predatory interest is firmly squashed as the sound is tracked to one of the convoy's bedrooms.

Not his. Memory did not supply who did own it, and after a long moment of thought and listening, one hand rises to rap against the door twice, sharp enough that he's sure he'll be heard.

"Do you require assistance?"

It's not hunting. It's seeing to nominal allies.

Levi'd been standing guard outside of SecUnit's room for multiple days with no excitement. But this time when he returns there's noises from inside the room and that's very worrying. SecUnit was a husk, did it hatch into some sort of monster? Or did someone get in there and try to break the husk? He's not really sure which would be preferable but he doesn't have time to think before he draws a hand gun and enters.

"Si...ecUnit?" He's not sure what he expected but its not this. Was that good? He's still on alert and doesn't put his gun away but he doesn't point it directly at SecUnit. It could still be a threat even if it didn't look like a monster (more than usual, at least).

Serph normally is out at night (hunting, always hunting) so he encounters SecUnit from outside the shields. His eyes widen in surprise. He had fully expected it to stay coated in that strange metal, a potential metaphorical bomb waiting to explode if SecUnit's husk hatched. But given how many unhatched husks litter the environment, he was expecting it to take much, much longer for that situation to occur.

It... does not appear to be completely transformed in the way the monsters out in the wilds are. The question is whether it still has its mind, though the fact it isn't covered in blood from harming someone on the Convoy is a good start.

He openly approaches SecUnit from where it can see him easily. "SecUnit," he calls. A pause, before he adds, "It's good to see you."

"SecUnit!"

Jack is coming out of his van, heading towards the convoy, when he sees the very familiar and kind of unexpected face. SecUnit has, as far as he knew, been encased in metal for weeks, and he was starting to despair if it ever coming out. Or coming out even more changed.

Now he's annoyed with himself for not having the finished masks in his pocket to offer it, even though he could have had no actual way of predicting it would bust free at this specific moment.

But he does jog in its direction, beaming. "You're all right!"

[ jayce hasn't been hanging too close to the convoy due to his noticeably staggering size and an appearance that one would rather burn at the stake. the geiger counters go wild with this one, lads. the rotting deer-thing hanging around provided shady areas just exudes magical radiation of an infectious sort. the kind you don't want to touch, or breathe, or by gods look at.

he does stir at the thrumming sound of background noise– a tv show, but to him is just a bunch of noise out of nowhere. now where the hell is that coming from? the stag's rotting skull peers out from under the canopy of a valley tree. only its ears move to search for spund. the eye sockets seem to lack eyes. ]

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around the convoy (but jaybe a bit beyond)