3928/ By the Sea Shore

By the Sea Shore
Date of Scene:	20 March 2016
Location:	Great Ocean - Western Loop
Synopsis:	You know how you know you're about to fuck up? Yeah, Will doesn't. Sometimes that part of his brain just kind of turns off, especially when machines are involved. Machines and Abyssal Ships, apparently.
Cast of Characters:	William Pauwel, Wo

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William Pauwel has posed:
    Will Pauwel has had a pretty wild week overall. From almost falling out of an airship to getting thrown into a (friendly, admittedy) killer robot, he's been through enough scrapes and bruises to crack most of the bones in his body several times over. But he's a tough little scamp, and so he's kept right on trucking.

Today, though, today he's taking a bit of a breather.

    Every so often, cargo and mysterious packages will wash up on the shores of some of Meridian's more distant mainland peninsulas. With the help of a friendly sea captain and a certain Merchant Lord, Will has managed to charter a small boat to a particularly remote stretch of sand and surf. Ostensibly he's here to hunt for treasure.

    In reality, he's just taking a breather after the beating he's endured recently. Having puttered around a decent stretch of an island called Kahore on motorcycle, Will has come to a stop at one of its many white, sandy beaches.

For... Well, mostly for sitting under a coconut palm and sipping some refreshing juice.

It's pretty relaxing, honestly.

Wo has posed:
For the most part, it's the usual flotsam and jetsam that one might expect to see, nestled sporadically between awash seaweed and other ocean debris on the sand. The seas and currents that connect with the multiverse now bring a slightly more diverse bounty, at times, but it seems at first that today won't be such a day. With a bit more exploration, however, there was at least something unusual about it, though. Mixed in with the usual, dull grey metal and waterlogged wood, there are a few fragments that appear in stark contrast to them. Their shiny black surfaces glimmer like an onyx, amongst the uncut jewels of most of the wreckage. It appears to be weathered metal, with a coating almost flesh-like on top of it. Gross.

    Further investigation around those would reveal a few more fragments, but scattered around more considerable artifacts of what might have been a major naval engagement, somewhere along the ocean's currents. What looks to be a turret, half-buried in the sand from the wash, yet still relatively pristine and likely easily refurbished into firing condition: A human-scaled facsimile of a destroyer's 5-inch dual cannon. A similar mechanism that appears to be a half-wrecked set of torpedo tubes, still set into their launcher housing. Those are some pretty good finds -- but wait, there's more! It is from here that a relatively fresh oil slick contaminates the sands, the mixing with coastal tide water causing it to refract sunlight into that distinctive rainbow.

    Following that, a curious onlooker would come across what looks to be some kind of craft -- but hopefully Will didn't eat before he left, because it looks to have a humanoid's lower torso and legs still attached to it. It...doesn't look like a human's, though, exactly; instead of flesh, there is some kind of pitch black material beneath the starkly white flesh -- which is honestly, too pale even for a dead person to have. The skeletal components also look more like metal formed into the shape of a human's, rather than bone. Quite curious, if he isn't thoroughly creeped out by now. And then, obscured by some other wreckage, what can only be the top half: A girl seeming to be in her mid-teens, wearing a sailor top, sprawled -- unconscious at best, perhaps dead -- but it's hard to tell, with whatever this thing is. A black, horned helmet rests beside her side-ponytailed head, having jostled loose at some point.

    If he's going to do something, though, he'd best act fast. Some crabs have converged on this curious find, and appear to be studying both halves for how edible it might be. And they grow `em big around here, probably.

William Pauwel has posed:
    Will might be taking a personal day, but if there's anything he knows by now, it's that the Ancients really liked to cover their stuff in mysterious black material. He sits up when he notices the mysterious flotsam and jetsam begin filtering in, setting his coconut aside. Ordinarily, he'd write a stroke of luck like this one off as a mild hallucination or a coincidence, but...

    Well, hallucinations usually don't come in pairs, triplets or quadruplets, they certainly don't wash up on shore, and Will doesn't even know where he'd come up with the idea for tiny, human-scale, hand-held turrets. That's just crazy talk! Plus, if any of this belongs to a certain Black Fleet...

Well, there might be issues.

Giant coral monster related issues.

    The young Chaser bolts upright as more and more of the strange, alien junk begins coming ashore. He kicks off his boots and sprints down across the dunes. He regrets this decision immediately when his everything starts screaming in protest, but there's treasure to be had! And so he begins collecting it, piece by piece, dragging the bits he can salvage out of the roiling surf and onto the sand. It doesn't take him long to get to...

A... A pair of legs.

    "What in tarn--" Will jumps back once he realizes he was just MANHANDLING A CORPSE, OH MY GOD. His face is terribly pale-- not as pale as she is, of course. It is, however, growing progressively greener. The expected is inevitable when he takes notice of the UPPER TORSO lying RIGHT OVER THERE.

    Once he's recovered and had time to actually realize that the exposed bone and tissue is actually more metallic than squishy, Will begins to reconsider what actually happened here.

Is... she a robot?

There's a beat as he thinks.

What happens-- what happens if he puts her back together? Maybe all the stuff floating around is hers?

    He coughs, clearing his throat of whatever is left. Using a few spare palm leaves, he gingerly removes the strange bisected girl from the water and drags her further up the dunes. The first and probably most crucial step here is to reconnect her top and bottom halves.

He does so.

    ...And then, presuming that there isn't actually some magical self-repair going on, he also wheels over his trusty motorbike and begins picking through its compartment full of tools, until he finds what appears to be a very, VERY improvised hodgepodge of metal that he fits over the barrel of his oversized handgun.

Will pulls the trigger half-way. Electricity arcs up the metal contraption and gathers into a brightly glowing spark at the very end.

With it, he tries to... weld together a bisected pale-girl.

Wasn't today supposed to be a break from all the weirdness?

Wo has posed:
Well, on the plus side, nothing is *actively* trying to kill Will, in this process. So, he's got that. It is just...terribly bizarre, and probably quite upsetting. Even if she is obviously not a human, she still looks quite similar enough for it to cause understandable reactions. Ones that, apparently, include some degree of wanting to help. Or maybe just a natural inclination to tinker and experiment. In any case, the worst that Will faces in the attempt are those crabs, that are none-too-pleased with this development. Smaller ones scamper away, but those that remain still try to protect the find they got to first, putting up as respectable a fight as they can with their pincers. Pinch, PINCH. Overall, though, they are not nearly as bad as some of the mutated animals around, and aren't much more than an annoyance.

    The girl, herself, or robot...or whatever she is, is quite heavy, but still human moveable. Placing together the two halves, nothing immediately seems to happen. The cut, while a bit weathered from the sea trip here, looks almost too clean to be made by any common blade. Yet, that very property seems to have minimized the actual damage to whatever counts for the critical tissues and structures, here. So, maybe, there's still some hope. Will certainly hasn't given up, procuring his welding materials. While it doesn't work any immediate miracles, for some strange reason, the 'feel' of the situation to him would be that at least some physical reaction is occurring. Almost like some invisible HP bar is struggling to raise from 0 HP to 1. There is...a lot, though. While her kind do not effectively 'die,' it was close enough.

    After what is likely several minutes of doing the best he could, that feeling gives way to a more superficial kind of healing, as at least the obvious cut seems to have healed. With her like this, it becomes apparent that she had no legs from the knee down, to begin with -- this machinery likely served the same purpose, for purposes of getting about. Aside from the bracers on her arms, his other guesses also seem to bear out, as a turret and launcher on one side of that machinery match what he'd seen before, as well as a damaged point on the other, where they were probably sheered off. Regardless of whether he tries to fix that damage, though...

    A few more minutes on, the girl's pale eyes begin to creep open. She gives a glance to Will, her vision, already normally a bit cloudy for various reasons, giving her a hallucination of a man with a naval officer's uniform on. Her mouth inches into a smile, before realization dawns, and the image resolves into reality. The smile is gone, replaced by an instinctive levelling of one, albeit extremely shaky, arm at the one that performed the emergency repairs. The bracer on her arm folds somewhat, revealing yet *another* gun, much like the ones before, though this one has some kind of glowing red vapor and energy formed at the tip of the barrel.

    "Who...are you," she demands, as she seems to barely hold onto consciousness, except out of pure spite.

William Pauwel has posed:
    A little from column A, a little from column B. Certainly, if this strange robotic girl didn't at least superficially LOOK human- or at least vaguely humanoid- it's unlikely that Will would have actually stopped to try and repair her. He's been around enough robot-like-robots to know that some things are best left broken- it's easier to get at things he can salvage that way.

    But this situation seemed... different. Most of the particularly dangerous varieties of robot that he runs into don't come in a sailor outfit so stereotypical that even some of the Meridian Marines wear something similar at least once in their lives.

And so here he is, welding two halves of a broken machine back together in the vague hope that it'll do some good, and that he'll learn something from the experience.

    Sure enough, his effort seems to bear fruit! The girl's eyes open! Will's heart leaps in his chest. He experiences the bizarre urge to throw his head back and cackle madly to the sky, but somehow he resists it. That might have something to do with the fact that the girl he just, uh, repaired is pointing a gun at his face.

"W-woah there," Will says, having basically finished much of his weld by that point. He'd started trying to figure out how to re-affix one of the turrets by the time she'd woken up, to give his work some time to cool. He might've needed to make some adjustments, after all. "Calm down now. I ain't here to hurt'ya. Saw y'all washed up on this here beach and figured that a girl ain't supposed to be sawed in half except in a magic show."

"Name's William Pauwel. Most everyone calls me Will." He fiddles with a turret, but his eyes are definitely fixed on that deadly red glow. "Y'all ain't in such good shape. Maybe expendin' more energy to shoot me ain't the best idea?"

Wo has posed:
With a few more moments comes greater clarity. That's right, she had...been defeated. Doubtlessly, their enemy had already wrecked what was left of the base she had been protecting. This prompts her head to nod forward a bit, as the memories from when she was last aware of anything flood back in and become coherent. Not wanting to show weakness before a surface dwelling human, however, she still keeps that gun trained on him, but she isn't firing it. When she looks up again, it is with a frown marring her teenage girl's face. "Hmph," she dismisses, though while her modestly deep voice still tries to show some strength, it's obvious that it's still lacks the proper force behind it. "I will concede your point...there is little for me to fear from one surface denizen, holding a welder." Did she really have to phrase it that way!?

    A suffering sigh later, her lean arm lowers, and the glow that was at the end of the gun's bore dissipates. Not only was this surface dweller likely not meaning any harm, he was...right, she had precious little energy to bother fighting now. Not that she will confirm that fact aloud. "I am, the Destroyer Princess," she says, by way of simple, reciprocated introduction. His reasons still don't exactly fit in her head, though, so after a few more seconds, she lifts her body up, the machinery causing her to hover a few inches over the sandy soil, as she begins to close that distance. Her face looks skeptical. "That can't be all there is to it...why would a surface dweller do anything for an Abyssal ship--" Her body's lack of strength catches up to her, though, with the hover mechanisms failing, and causing her to tip forward.

    "Kuh--con...found those fleet daughters," she hisses, through fanged teeth, whether caught or with her gloved hands planted into the turf. "This is all...their fault, that I ended up like this. To be found like this, by a surface dweller. This is an embarassment..."

William Pauwel has posed:
    In a triumph of diplomacy, Will successfully convinces a killer robot boat to not shoot him in the face. Sure, this is mostly because he's basically as harmless as a particularly fluffy kitten (albeit one armed with a high-end plasma cannon in pistol form), but he'll take what he can get, especially when his everything is on the line.

Again.

Pride can be repaired, holes in the skull usually not.

There's also the fact that she can't possibly have enough juice to fire AND crawl out to sea, even if she operates on some kind of hover-leg apparatus. Will, confident in his small victory and in his logic, leans in to inspect his own weld-line. He pauses only once he learns that he SAVED AN ACTUAL PRINCESS. "Hold on there," Will blinks at his rescuee, looking just a little bit stunned. "What's all talk of living on the surface? You the daughter of some undersea robot queen, or something like that?"

IT MAKES SENSE IN HIS HEAD, OKAY.

    "Well, royalty or not, I don't know much about what an Abyssal is or ain't," Will says with the kind of bold-faced honesty that is nigh-on impossible to produce if you possess even a shred of deviousness in your soul. "I found a girl in two pieces and figured she needed a helping hand is all--"

Will suddenly finds that his prediction on her energy reserves was in fact spot on! Because the destroyer princess topples right into him. This is kind of a problem, because she weighs way too much, and he's still half-broken himself. She tumbles into him, and he buckles to his knees because his poor joints won't support both his weight and hers. Fortunately, he does catch her like that, sort of! Unfortunately, it comes at the cost of HURTING LIKE THE DICKINS. "Nnnnggg--- I don't know nothing about fleet daughters either!" He groans, slowly trying to lower his load down against the nearby coconut palm. His results might be... mixed. "T'ain't an embarassment to need help though, is it?"

Wo has posed:
How are you supposed to save the girl if you can't even support her weight! ...but yeah, all that metal isn't doing wonders for his already injured body. Thankfully it's more of a glancing blow, than completely crushing him. After a moment of not-at-all wallowing in some kind of haughty form of self-pity, Will's genuine befuddlement finally processes through it. She gives that same skeptical look with her pale, now obviously slightly glowing, eyes. "You were serious..." After a moment, her mouth moves into a frown, as she gives another sigh, as she closes her eyes, pushing off from him with her arms, and finding enough hover-strength to find a rock or crate to rest her weight on, instead. "I suppose that explains things, then. No surface person from my world of origin would do such a thing for a sworn enemy -- and rightly not."

    Reaching over to where her armored helmet is, she lifts it to rest on her head, to feel a bit more complete. She supposes there is no harm in revealing at least a little bit. "I am an Abyssal, so named because we arose from the depths. The product of war and violence...we were unable to find rest, and returned to have our revenge on those that used us, then threw us away." She will keep some other particulars to herself, for now. The 'company line' is common among her kind, even if she is from a slightly different stock than the multiverse is accustomed to. "--the people of the surface are our enemy. They would seek to destroy their own creations, just because they can no longer tell us what to do." However...it's that latter part that causes her to quiver again, and she bares her fangs, even if she doesn't become more actively aggressive than that.

    "To my kind, it is. To need the help of others is to show your weakness. I had sunken honorably...and now I will have to return to face my defeat." It's for this reason and logic that she turns her eyes out toward the see, now, that frown resting fully on her face. "...and that is why you shouldn't expect any gratitude, William Pauwel. You've given me a second chance, but you've not done me a favor." Nonetheless, digging her hands into the sand again and clutching it, she gives out a sigh. "--I will not waste the opportunity, however. Moreover...did I damage you critically? I know your kind can be frail." Speaking like the one that didn't about smash him from her own hubris.

William Pauwel has posed:
    Even by local standards, Will is kind of... bad at this whole 'accidentally doing things you shouldn't have done' thing. But in this case, he's totally innocent! How could he have possibly known that the pale-faced, legless robot-girl he rescued was actually some kind of crazy killer ship-type thing!? It's impossible, that's how. But in this case, she's... Not exactly trying to kill him, personally?

That's a plus, right?

    "So... That kind've sounds familiar, honestly," Will says with a bit of an uneasy laugh. He cracks open a fresh coconut, regardless, and starts to sip at its juices while his TERRIFYING KILLER ROBOT guest explains her position. "So, sorry if this is a bit rude, but... Are y'all sure they're not tryin' to destroy you on account'a y'all tryin' to exact terrible vengeance upon all of them and theirs?" He stops, wisely, when he notes that her teeth are really quite pointy. Is it because of fear, or because he knows it's rude to call out someone else's personal quest for revenge?

All is lost to the sound of him drinking from a coconut.

    He sputters a bit at her reaction to having her life literally knit back together. That's not usually something you hear around these parts, it seems. "Ah, naw, I'm fine, really. Wouldn't've hurt so bad if I weren't still healing after this one airship incident, but y'all probably wouldn't know 'bout that." Will coughs, clearing his throat. Death before dishonor is a bit of a foreign concept to the young Chaser; here, survival and discovery are the clearest signs of success. No fame or fortune in your own death, after all. "Well, anyway. I didn't save yer life for a favor or anything like that. I just thought you'd be happier alive than dead, on account'a not feeling anything at all as a corpse. But, you know, you ever think about... Not goin' off to kill and be killed, or something?"

Wo has posed:
Such notions are immediately dismissed, and with battle-hardened prejudice: "They attack us because we are an uncomfortable part of them, which they fear." Someone that went repairing something potentially dangerous to him should know well the conceits of the surface dwellers! The girl narrows her eyes, glowing from beneath the subtle shading offered by her horned helmet, to make her point. While it, along with the rest of her armored pieces, still seems thoroughly pitted and cracked, it would likely be a mistake to pursue that sort of thing any further, with that kind of glare being levelled. "...but, you are obviously not one of the surface people of my world, or you would have known better." Her gaze finally softens again, and glances off to the waves, "I will overlook your meddlesome questions, as you didn't know better." See, she can be reasonable and flexible, in a pinch.

    Aaaand, then it's gone. She appears to listen passively as Will makes the rest of his case. While it is probably a nice sentiment, she is too hardboiled for it to sink very deeply. "Impossible," she states, simply. "I was built as a machine for war, and that hasn't changed, even if my form has. You might as well ask the sun not to rise." As if making her point, she raises that guard on her left arm, the one gun still functioning there sighted at a distant target, and thankfully not Will this time. "If you are intending to make me promise not to throw my life away, I won't. This was set into motion long before you were born." Though she's admittedly guessing on Will's age, based on what she knows of surface dweller physiology. However, after that, she does gaze over at Will again, after mention of his prior injuries. Her pale eyes also pivot to his welding equipment.

    "I should be going," she continues, as the light frown returns. "They will have detected my revival, by now. Not every one of them is as nice as me." ...was that supposed to be a joke? Probably not. "I'm not indebted to you -- but I'll remember this." With this spoken, she picks herself back up again, the hover system remaining wobbly but at least functional, as she begins to make her way down to the beach. She doesn't seem bothered to reclaim any pieces she might be missing, in the process. She does state plainly, right at the water's edge, though, "It is probably best if we don't meet again, William Pauwel."

William Pauwel has posed:
Well.

Will had no idea that the anthropomorphic personifications of sunken ships even had nerves that could get touched in a bad way.

    Best to just leave that one where it is, though. The chances of him getting a hole blown through his chest are non-zero, after all. The young Chaser simply scratches at his chin as he tries to pick through this strange spirit's knotted and gnarled logic. "Well, heck, a lot of people around these parts're descended from folk built for war and battle, but we get on pretty well these days. Ain't nothing we can do to change the past, but that don't mean we ain't changing the now!" Will says, staring out to the gently rolling waves and the sunlight glistening across them. "Of course things're set into motion 'fore I was born. But that don't mean I ain't got stock in it, or that we the living can't do something for what's been coming or what's been done. Why," he gives an easy grin as he starts hammering at his coconut's shell with the butt of his gun, "I'm a Chaser, y'see? Go down, find old broken things, fix 'em up to see what they do. So you might say that meddlin' in things from way before my time is part of my job!"

But, no matter how much he'd really like to, it's unlikely a heartfelt expression of the wonders of self-employment and the Chasing profession are going to do much to sway this princess' stance.

He can, however, continue to be concerned at the fact that she's still very much wobbly. Will stands up, setting his half-cracked coconut aside, and hobbles after the ship as she hovers down towards the sea. "Hey, wait just a little, would you? I still need t' reattach your other bits!" She can't just leave them lying around, can she? That... seems vaguely unsanitary. Or maybe Will's just trying to stall her??

    "If you've really gotta go," he says after a moment, standing at the water's edge with his arms over his chest, "Y'all can at least give me a better sendin' off than that! I ain't one of yer surfacers, right? We ain't got no quarrel t'ween us, so don't go sayin' somethin' like that. It ain't a good omen!" There's a sense that he's either genuinely worried about her tumbling over and sinking again, or perhaps a bit... disappointed at being left alone.

Maybe both?

"At least leave off with somethin' a little less ominous, would you?"

Wo has posed:
Well, that's royalty for you. So detached from the every day concerns, and so wrapped up into their narrow world view. It's even worse when you're some kind of ship ghost that's been twisted into this shape. "That's -- a foolish way to live," she chides, still looking out onto the waves. "Yet, your optimism reminds me of something...maybe one day, I'll be able to remember what." That's probably the best that he'll be able to get out of her, though, as she turns to give a stern look as he tries to bring up that she isn't fully repaired yet. "You've done enough," she states in that same blunt fashion. "It isn't worth fixing that scrap. I will improve on that which was before...and strike back for all these humiliations I've suffered." She narrows her eyes again, as she casts them over, though she doesn't seem angry at Will, instead someone that...isn't present.

    Then she gives a sigh, letting her eyes lapse closed. As, for just this moment, she will settle one gloved hand against Will's shoulder. It's a bit forceful, but she isn't physically shoving him away, at least. "Very well. If you truly wish to understand the dynamics of the situation, seek out the ones called the fleet daughters. If, despite my warnings, you choose to get involved in this -- then perhaps we will see each other again." Not that she can imagine why any surface person, even if they aren't prejudiced like she assumes the ones of her world to be, would want that. "It must be a 'Chaser's place to seek danger when they could exist in safety. You are strange." With that, she draws back, seeming to do an internal run-down of her seaworthiness, for what it's worth...even if she is still wobbling, she seems to be managing now that she's aware of her current limitations.

    And then she drifts out onto the water, seemingly a bit more stable there. Just as several sonar blips appear on her barely-workable radar. "They're here. Make yourself scarce." She drifts out to join them without further word, several tall and pale figures just-visible out on the horizon. After a few moments, they submerge, or perhaps moved just out of sight.

William Pauwel has posed:
    Will is clearly not very well practiced at dealing with royalty. They don't even have that sort of thing around these parts! Well, that's a lie- Iskandria has an Imperatrix, but Will hasn't ever actually been over there. Not yet, anyway. "Yeah, well, maybe I will," he says as the Destroyer Princess begins drawing back away. He touches a hand to his shoulder where she pushed back against him-- or was that just because he was touched by a ship? "I ain't exactly well versed in the goings on of outside places, but I also ain't the type to run away from someplace I aught to be!"

Will grins. It's unusually sincere, despite the very visible bandages wrapped around his upper torso, arms and legs. "S' like you said. A Chaser ain't a Chaser if they ain't runnin' headlong into danger. The only way to find anythin' worthwhile is to go and chase after it, after all!"

Maybe that's why they're called Chasers?

    But with that, she begins floating away in earnest. He briefly catches sight of strange figures on the distant horizon-- her friends? Are they friends, or just comrades? Will murmurs, scratching mildly at his cheek. "Right, y'all take care now. If you gotta get cut in half again, try t' wash up on a shore somewhere I can find you, y'hear?"

It seems he's pretty stubborn about this FRIENDSHIP thing!!