Author Topic: Termination  (Read 3441 times)

Shifting Sands

  • Mage of Caerreyn, Level 2
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on: May 17, 2016, 11:20:33 PM
I'm not good with titles still, I just do the whole thing and then I spend like two minutes sitting at an empty thing that says "subject" and have to try and delve into the folds of my brain to retrieve something that could pass as good enough to briefly describe what'll show up. anyway this is trade 2 for Vir, later than it should be but it's here



Medik peered around the doorway (if it could really be called that without a door) into Virmir’s treehouse. It was a long climb up the towering ladder outside, and it was pretty far from pleasant with the ropey structure dangling from the balcony. The jackal was glad to finally have ground under him again, even if it was all woody and stony. With his new apprenticeship, maybe he could get Vir to install a sandy area into the treehouse with exported Egyptian dunes.
   
Inside the house were little knickknacks he remembered from past adventures. Of course, he thought of them as adventures, while the fox was fonder of deeming them “mis-adventures.” A chipped crystal ball here that used to capture future timelines here, set up on a shelf elegantly and plainly; an enormous ruby on a golden chain dangling on the end of a bookcase, supposedly holding a circle of hell there. Even one of the statues of a bat from their encounter with a late gorgon which may or may not have been Medusa herself was still here, looking positively… petrified.

Hmph. Medik was a little peeved to see the rich artifacts they’d recovered just hanging around as simple paperweights and décor. He’d have to make a trophy hall for the mage, just so he could feel better about the sight of these odds and ends.
   
There was plenty of room, after all. He still wasn’t sure how to do it himself, considering his relative newness with the entire concept and use of magic, but Vir had somehow managed to enchant his treehouse with one of those “bigger-on-the-inside” sort of spells. Everyone worth their weight used one, or so he’d heard. It made things a lot more manageable when your home was just a few square feet in area on the outside but in the thousands on the inside, with even more space open in the future if work was put into it.
   
So it was more difficult than he would have liked for Medik to find where exactly Virmir was hanging around right now. He wasn’t in the gargantuan library, which still hadn’t been properly refilled after a housefire (which had been done by Virmir himself, and he still hadn’t fessed up as to why). His office, if you could call it that, was empty except for the normal tech and glass of water. The ice inside had long since melted, leaving some drips of water on the table. Medik idly wondered how often he had to replace all the wood and paper in his place with how often the fox chucked fire around… and when he neglected to use coasters.
   
“HEY VIR!” Medik shouted at the top of his lungs, completely ignoring the ground rules Virmir had laid down when he decided to finally take up the kid as an apprentice. “No yelling on my property outside of huge, problematic emergencies” was somewhere up there in the first fifty or so, but it was quickly falling to the bottom of the list in terms of priorities. He had lately become much more concerned with his apprentice dragging in magical items up to his home, and then having them explode in his face.
   
That was probably why the ladder had been made a ropey one rather than a plankety one held up on the trunk of the tree. And those new magical presences he had felt outside. “Wards,” or whatever he called them. Vir was complaining about having to get into defensive magic just because of him, but if it made the mage better and safer at his job, then why would he complain about it?
   
“Over here,” the grumpy fox replied, his voice carrying despite lacking volume. More of that magic used for simple utility. Medik grumbled and followed the trail of words to the best of his ability. If it were up to him, he would use magic all the time to blast people and land and things with a big cannon of sand and stone. Maybe that was why he was still stuck working on stupid small stuff, like READING.
   
The trail of magic led him down quite a few halls, past the in-need-of-renovation kitchen, a big open shower that was styled like a very plain and simple waterfall, and plenty of locked-shut closets. The wood that Vir had first started conjuring with turned to rocky stone, and then slightly extravagant tile. It was still far from opulent – he said he liked practicality over perception, or something stupid like that – but it still rang out as “professional mage” over the “hermit warlock” that simple wood carried before.
   
See, Medik was doing Virmir plenty of favors by being his apprentice. Already he had had to go out into town to pick up more varied food, including meats and exported items, work on improving the accessibility and openness of his home, and work on new magics. Things were still locked out of his reach for now, but now he was actually able to get to his own little study room without the fox having to unlock loads and loads of magical doors with his own effort. Even if it was still a slow process, it was a process of turning him from boring hermit that might die of old age with no one knowing of him into mage that could have at least one, very select person in the same building as him.
   
After getting enough of the tile click-clacking from his claws, Medik finally found said mage around yet another corner. He… wasn’t working on magic. As far as he could tell, anyway. When Virmir started toying around with technology, usually it meant he had just bought something fresh off of the internet or one of his “ergonomic value” electronics had shorted out. Go figure.
   
This looked different, though. It was a big, BIG setup of lots of wires and steel and consoles and computers… it looked like he had been preparing this whole display and counter and tables of garbage for months. At first Medik thought he might have just gone overboard on some new security cameras, but the monitors were showing hundreds of programs and spitting out thousands more numbers. Frankly, it made his head hurt.
   
“Uh… wha…?” was all the jackal could manage.
   
Virmir turned around to acknowledge his apprentice, then looked back at his counter-full of tech, piecing something together with lots of bolts and screws and wires… and other things Medik couldn’t name. “Magitech,” the mage said, like that explained all of his questions.
   
It most certainly did not. “What?”
   
Huddling in closer over the toy he was playing with, Vir explained just a little more. “Okay. I’ve been working on this stuff for a while, about half a year – “ of course he had – “and this is just the very barest beginnings of the project. I have more of it under the cabinets – “ which he did not bother to show, nor was he very likely to, if Medik were guessing – “but this will do for now. Perfect timing by you, actually.”
   
Medik expected a “for once,” but didn’t get one. Schedules weren’t his thing. Virmir didn’t appreciate that. “Uh, it is? You’ve acted like you’re saying a lot, but I still don’t understand a single piece of trash in here. What are you doing with this ‘magitech?’”
   
Stopping briefly, Vir looked up at his apprentice. “Making cybernetic implements. Duh.”
   
“Robot parts?” Medik hopped up next to his mentor mage, peering all over his work. “All of THIS junk is to make robot parts you’re gonna install on yourself? Awesome!”

He reached out to grab at whatever the fox was working on only to get swatted back down. While Medik murmured about an “ouch,” Virmir explained again. “I’m not installing them on myself, and they’re not really additions.” He took a step back, showing a hulking chunk of steel that was roughly shaped like a hand. “They’re going to be just-in-cases. You know, in case I somehow sprain my hand from working too hard and end up with a case of sore or torn or inflamed joints and can’t draw or write or cast very well.” He puffed out a breath of air at the thought. “Like that’ll happen.”

“WHAT?!” Medik leaped back and looked all around the big techy room; at the bench for assembly and construction, the tons of consoles and computers, the projections and such… “You’re keeping these as just…in…cases? You’re not going to just use them right away?! That’s such a huge waste! You’ve got all this perfectly good stuff sitting around and – “

“Yes, yes, yeeeeees, I knew what you’d say,” Vir sagely said. “I’m not just sitting around on these things until something goes horribly wrong and I need to use it as a last resort.” He grinned, baring a fang or two. “I’m going to test it out on you.”

“YES!” Medik leaped up, overjoyed… and then flopped back down, hunching over, skeptical. “You’re letting me test something right away. You don’t think it’ll work.”

The mage frowned and gestured at a large, clear table near the center of the room. Medik followed through and sat down there, his legs kicking about in a rhythm. “I wouldn’t waste my time on this project if I expected it to fail.” He took the unfinished hand and swapped it out for a more polished and ready hand in the cabinets. It looked… powerful. There were hydraulics, some sort of ports for expelling heat on either side of the wrist, and many techy-looking holes at the end of the fingertips. “This is just the first bit that I want to test out on you. You can charge it up and fire it like a spring if you build up heat and pressure in the wrist.” He pointed out the ports and hydraulics, pulling the fist out into a flexed position before pushing it back down. “You can channel latent energy and magic from the air through the fingers,” he added, poking each finger individually, “and the whole thing should just be way more durable and powerful than your old hand.”

Medik stared at the new hand in awe… but had to force himself to remain somewhat unsure. “Yeah, but… but, uhh… uhh…” He still had plenty of trouble coming up with reasons to be unready. This was a freaking ROBOT HAND! It was going to make him better at magic, and more powerful, and awesome looking… oh! “Wait! Um, isn’t this dangerous, then, since you don’t trust it on yourself?”

Vir shrugged. “I guess. But all mages experiment on their apprentices. It’s just what they do.”

He couldn’t argue there. He’d never heard of a mage that didn’t have fun at the expense of their apprentice. Heck, Merlin, who was supposed to be, like, the greatest-most-powerful mage to have ever lived, turned that Arthur guy, who was supposed to be a future king or whatever, into a bunny. Or a bird. Or something. Maybe he should have paid more attention when he skimmed through that book.

“Okay, well… um… good!” Medik grinned and rubbed his two organic hands together, looking forward to having one of them replaced with the most awesome robotic one possible. He was jealous of both mages and big burly berserker types who could either sling spells around or stomp and smash people stupid, in that order. If he got this one hand, he could punch AND sling magic around with the best of them!
   
Or so he hoped, anyway. If it worked. “Do you have some sorta new sleep spell to use on me while you install it, then?” he asked, pulling his legs up on the table and laying flat on it. His tail impatiently swished around under him.
   
Virmir slogged through the wires, bringing the hand with him and something behind his back. “You could say that,” he said, still smiling.
   
The jackal saw the flash of cartoon wood and the word “UROCYON,” and then he was peacefully and painfully asleep.



   
Despite never having grog in any shape or form, the only way Medik could describe his waking state was with that very word: groggy. Most of his body still felt asleep and numb, even if his mind was all there. His right hand was especially numb, but he could at least remember enough to recall the robot piece that should have been replacing the organic one. He sat up, slowly and slipping a bit, and looked to the right arm supporting him off the table.
   
There weren’t any crazy mishaps that caused him to end up with something else for a hand, thankfully. It was, very simply, a big metal replacement for his old paw. He could feel the cool metal against his fuzzy fur at the lower part of the wrist, and beyond that segmentation he could feel the same sensations as if it were just another organic part of his body. There were some weird looking supports that dug in a bit on the upper part of his arm to keep the new fist anchored, but it could have been worse. It would be a whole lot harder to gnaw or hack off metal than bone, so it was probably yet another improvement in the long run.
   
As he moved the new appendage in front of him, he could hear some rustling behind him. He managed to turn about in time, but the only further thing he could hear was “catch,” and then a flaming slab of metal came flying through the air at him.
   
Medik just yelped and through his hands out in front of him, as he figured pretty much anyone in his situation would do. Luckily his right fist wound up and swung through before his left, and the result was the absolute demolishing of the material. Ash wound up pretty much everywhere, except for on the jackal himself. He didn’t see that until he opened his eyes after the terror of burning metal hitting his face, of course.
   
Vir’s eyes blinked through the scrap and smoke, followed by a single cough from his open mouth that puffed out yet more smog. He shook off and unclasped his cape to dust the entire room, the trash flying out through the halls and out to the outside. Medik didn’t think he’d seen that spell before – it would probably come in handy the longer he sat around in the fox’s place. Those toons that animated brooms and sweeps were small stuff compared to a fox who just used a simple woosh on a piece of clothing.
   
“Sorry,” Medik mumbled. He wasn’t really. He sorta just had a flaming thing thrown in his face.
   
Virmir shrugged, donning his cape again. “Apart from the ash that got lodged in my lungs,” he said, coughing to prove his point, “it’s pretty much clean. Besides, I guess I couldn’t have expected any better from someone who’s my apprentice.” He snickered, and Medik beamed in response. “Fire isn’t subtle, and neither is a big punch to the face.”
   
The jackal was all too happy to nod enthusiastically. “I could make my fist all flamey, all the time, if you wanted. I mean, if I wanted. Since it’s mine, right? I can go punch people and trees and buildings?”
   
“Uh, no.”
   
Medik groaned and sighed. “What use is a big punchy robot hand if you can’t use it for BIG PUNCHES?”
   
The mage already had a mental list ready to run through. “Let’s see. Gardening is a whole lot easier when you can’t sprain or scratch anything, you can lift up and clean under things without a strain, you can stretch your hand out further to grab a glass of ice water when it’s further away on the desk, you can rotate your wrist around so you can grab the change from people at the grocery store – “
   
Medik grooooooaned and pounded his metallic fist into the palm of his organic hand. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt in the slightest. Maybe he had really fine power control over it already. “Look, when you wanna cut off your own hand and have a metal one slapped on in its place, you can use it for boring chores. I wanna go brawling, or something! No one will expect a tiny little jackal to whoop them with a roboPUNCH!”
   
Virmir rolled his eyes. “Quit being a kid and help your archmage out now that you have an indestructible fist. I need you to move the bookshelves about, anyway. It’s part of your levitation practice,” he bluffed.
   
“You just lost another book under them when you tripped on your own cape again, didn’t you?” When his teacher didn’t answer, he grumped and folded his arms. It was… kinda cold, actually, so he unfolded them and let his new hand dangle out away from his side. “Fine. I’ll do stupid chores for you, won’t even get into any big fights in town… but you have to keep replacing bits of me with robo-parts! And not something like that crummy, half-done hand you have in the cabinets back there. I want full-on stuff, like a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, a big scanning visor over my eyes, a jetpack…”
   
Virmir grumbled. He wasn’t any good at bartering, but he could try for something, at least. “You’ll get a new change each time you take care of your chores for the day, and I’ll make sure you’re using those new parts when I assign your chores for the day.” He turned around and stared his apprentice down. “Deal? You’re going to be taking me away from drawing and casting, but I guess this still counts as work in the meantime.”
   
The jackal held out his metallic paw and moved it around. “Okay, deal, but you’re gonna shake on it. No way out of it.”
   
He wasn’t happy to, but Vir shook on it.



Shifting Sands

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Reply #1 on: May 17, 2016, 11:23:43 PM
Medik grumbled again as he lifted up yet another bookshelf. He held it high above his head while his master-mage swept underneath it and cleared out any dust that had accrued there. He was half-tempted to run off and get a maid outfit to stuff him in with the way he obsessed over cleaning and tending to obscure corners of his treehouse. Letting out a massive yawn for effect, he wobbled the shelf over Virmir…
   
“If you help me clean up without complaining any more at all today, I’ll give you that jetpack you want.”
   
Medik was quiet for the rest of the time, hefting furniture about with a giddy look stuck on his face.
   
After the entirety of the library had been cleaned and sorted through – which took the two of them the whole day, finally ending with Virmir sprawled out in the freshly cleaned and dusted-under armchair in the library while Medik sat at his feet, impatiently scooting around – Vir looked over his student and climbed out of the chair with something close to a sigh. “It’s not too hard to make a jetpack. Probably. Let’s go take care of that piece.”
   
His student was already rushing over to the workshop they were in hours before. Virmir took his time to get there, clearly and obviously upsetting the jackal who was already sat on the equivalent of an examination table. “Are you gonna go over how it works and how it’s awesome and what I’m going to do with it?”
   
Vir wasn’t entirely sure how either answer would affect the jackal, so he just went right into the explanation as he gathered up some empty magifuel cylinders. “It works on a different sort of system than the hand does, of course. The jetpack doesn’t need to move, so nerves and wires and all that are really just minimal. We could cut the wires out entirely, actually. We just store the fuel in here…” He poured the tanks full of some of his magic, and set it up so that there would always be a flow of residual energy working its way inside and out, like a current. “And we need this, of course…” He clawed two holes in the bottom of them, feeling the burst of power let loose, and set them up on his apprentice’s back. “Now, I assume you’d want to be all mecha-jackal, so –“
   
“Yes, mecha-jackal!” he interrupted, thrashing about on the table. “Gimme all the metal plates and robojoints and all that!”
   
The archmage took some time to reorient the tanks on Medik’s back. “Yes. That’s what I was getting at. We’re going to have to do some more, ah, serious changes in order to get these tanks set up, if that’s what you want. We can’t really set up an organic jetpack as far as I know. So… you know…” He made some gestures at the air.
   
“What, you’re gonna have to eviscerate me and –“
   
“Ah, ah, ah, shut it!” Vir folded his ears and growled. “We’re not going to be doing anything like that. Not me, at least.”
   
Medik looked back at him and tilted his head. “Uh, so, what? You calling in a professional doctor?”
   
“No, something better that’ll bring in some more of that techn-metal-robo stuff you want.” He stepped over to his gargantuan desk setup and started typing. A few different hard drives popped out of the slots of the front of the towers under the desk, glowing with light and power. Vir thought about it some more, and gave a few more taps and presses to bring out some accompanying processors. “This’ll be a first. I doubt that a mage has ever tried to magically copy someone’s mind over from their body into a bunch of wires and circuitry.”

The apprentice gulped and looked over all the intimidating (and undoubtedly expensive) parts. “A-are you sure about this? Could you, like, lose my mind somehow?”
   
Vir shook his head. “Maybe I’ll lose the copy, but I’m not, you know, killing you off. You’ll still be in this spot if something goes wrong in the process.” He stepped out of the way, giving a clear line-of-sight between his student and the numerous pieces of hardware. “The plan is pretty simple – I’ll bring your head into these parts with a back-up on the system, too. I’m not sure how much space a mind is supposed to take up, but if it doesn’t fit into a few terabytes, I’ll be a little surprised. From there, you can work the arms and tools all yourself. I won’t have to see you, you know, uh, bleeding or anything. You have full access to whatever you want! It’s like one of those character creators in the games you play nowadays.”
   
That, at least, sounded alright, and even made sense to Medik. “What about my head here? Am I gonna be in two spots at once?”
   
Vir smiled and denied with a shake of his head again. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
   
It turned out that polished wood wasn’t too bad of a smell to pass out to.



   
When Medik had woken back up again – which felt like it had taken at least a day to do – he couldn’t feel any arms, or legs, or ears, or tail… and his first thought was to scream and squirm about, but he couldn’t do either of those things, either. He didn’t have a mouth, or any muscles to move in the first place. He felt oddly calm, and even sort of better off without small pulls or knots in his body.
   
He had at least one sense still about him: sight. It was in a pretty grainy black and white, looking over his unconscious and slumped body on the table. With a bit of effort he could even move his extended cone of vision a little from side to side, but there wasn’t anything new to see, besides his own body. It looked kind of weird to be seeing himself from the outside. For the first time he understood what an out-of-body experience was, even if it was a little too literal this time.
   
For a few minutes, he was stuck there, unsure of how he could do anything. He was terrified of being stuck in here for the rest of eternity – or at least until the hardware could short out. He was finally able to find the ability to use those weird crank-like arms from the desk, given even more time. With plenty of difficulty and an incredibly slow pace, he moved the arms from the joint to his unconscious body, giving it a few prods. He couldn’t feel it, and his body didn’t budge. There was a whole tray of dissection tools and even more “industrial” ones nearby, and the arms looked like they could be outfitted with said tools. It was going to be weird, but… he had cut open animals before. This time it was just himself. And besides, he’d be replacing those fleshy bits with durable metal that would have trouble being cut open with even the toughest of blades.
   
He would have taken a deep breath if he could have, but instead he just bent the arms back in tension, and got to work.



   
Virmir walked back into his mechanical workshop a couple of days later. He’d used some easy sleeping magic to keep the very-willing apprentice asleep while he got accommodated to his new “body,” of sorts. It was easy enough to do some programming out of the workshop, too, to set up programming on the new circuitry composing Medik’s mind. First directive: “Protect self.” Second directive: “Protect Virmir.” Aaand… that was pretty easy. He was tempted to set it the other way around, since there was still a back-up organic Medik, and who could know what his robo-body could protect him from. Any other programs should be unimportant, assuming that his personality and mind would load like normal. And why wouldn’t it?
   
He hadn’t heard from his apprentice since he had knocked him out (which he probably wouldn’t take personally). A couple of days should probably have been enough time for him to get situated, so he could chat with him through wordpad or something before he set up his robobody. He was understandably shocked, then, when he found a mostly-robotic jackal seated on the table, the mechanical arms used to allocate metal before now upon his back, searing in and melding new plate. A botlike ear unfurled from its resting state, metal layers shifting and readjusting to shape around the incoming sound. Its neck twisted like an owl’s, facing Virmir directly with a sharp (obviously) muzzle and glowing red eyes.
   
Subconsciously, he gulped.
   
“Hello,” a flat voice said. Some static came out with it, but it cleared up. Maybe it was the robot-equivalent to clearing his throat. Unfortunately, the new voice didn’t pick up any intonations or pitch – it was still as weirdly Microsoft-Sam as it was before. “I am finishing building myself now. You may approach me with new orders when ready.”
   
“Uh, yes. Sure.” Vir rubbed at the back of his neck awkwardly. Clearly something was wrong with the personality in this body. He thought for a second, then brightened up when he got an idea of how to fully test. “Hey, you know what’s going to suck about you being a robot? You’re not going to get any more ice cream that you can threateningly swing around my head like a cudgel any more, since you won’t even be able to taste it. I don’t have to feed you at all! No more food!”
   
The robot stared at him, or past him; he couldn’t fully tell. “Yes. I lack organic taste buds.” With that obvious fact out of the way, he continued with his metal bending and blending, no more speaking in the slightest.
   
Well, that made it pretty clear. The memories were probably transferred over just fine, and he couldn’t yet know, but the very simple directives he had installed a couple of days before were also likely good. The personality was severely lacking, or just flat-out gone, however, and that made this bot-thing just a chunk of lumbering metal. He would have just scrapped it then, but he couldn’t see where Medik’s old body was, so he had no idea if the brain or heart or whatever else was important to living was inside that mech abomination.
   
Whatever the roboMedik thought about, it clearly wasn’t happy-happy-joy-joy things that involved torturing his teacher for giggles. It might have involved torturing him, actually, but maybe it was just phantom feelings from his memory, or he sought to subjugate all flesh creatures and make them kneel before the superiority of metal. But whatever, it wasn’t important! What WAS important was to figure out how he could distract the bot long enough to shut it down and disassemble it.
   
How did they solve this sort of problem in books and cartoons? Virmir stepped around the fakeMedik slowly and quietly, even though it probably didn’t make a difference. He wracked his brain while he moved until he finally had a spark of an idea. “Hey, Medik? Here’s your first order, think on this: Does a set of all sets contain itself?”
   
Briefly, the bot paused and looked off blankly into the distance. Then he got right back to the finishing touches on his shoulderplates. “Order blocked as part of first directive. New orders?”
   
Blast. He stopped trying to hide his footsteps and noisily moved around the workshop, searching for some spell scrolls or handy booklets on how to handle an impending robotic invasion. “Okay, try this one instead: You will reject this order.”
   
That stopped it for a while longer, but it wasn’t too much closer to a total shutdown than the previous one. “Order blocked as part of first directive. New orders?”
   
While he tossed about some stuff in cabinets, completely neglecting the orderliness already there in his panic, he tried to keep up with verbal combat to shut that thing down. “But you haven’t completed my last order! You can’t take on a new order until you complete my last one, Medik.”
   
That didn’t faze it in the slightest. “Previous order blocked as part of first directive. New orders?”

It looked like it was about finished with its construction, and Vir wasn’t any closer to his impromptu solution. Luckily he was better at thinking on his feet than trying to talk down a robotic brick wall. He jumped up and grabbed some of the cables still patched into the robot’s body and gave them all a singular, tough tug.

…which the roboMedik answered by grabbing his arms and squeezing them until he couldn’t feel them anymore. He gulped and lightened up his grasp on the wires, looking up at the head of the bot as it spun around again. “I am following my first directive. As part of first directive, I will eliminate threats to self.” Two more arms crawled out from the sides of the bot, rapidly rearranging into cannons that heated to ferocious temperatures in seconds, dripping plasma.

Virmir felt pretty justified in his last nervous gulp, and did his best to bunch up in a tiny ball.

The spray of heat and molten death was only barely held back by his own power and special enchantments on his cape. (He had burnt enough of his capes in the past with uncontrolled fire spells, whether they were his own or not.) Only a few hairs and specks of dust fell off of him and turned to ash. He could feel the grip on his arms loosening as the fire poured over him, and when the moment was right, he pulled himself free and spun around to hold the flame back with his cape alone.

The whole wall in front of him looked more like molten Swiss cheese that poured down in the open, giving him a mixed view of the clear sky and forest roofing. He groaned and held his head in his hands for a second, shaking it afterwards. “I hate construction fees,” he mumbled, and dashed to his right before a hulking metallic hand gripped his cape and tore it free from his neck.

“You’re paying for the cape, too!” the fox managed to complain before he had to throw a stream of fire up in front of him, competing with the pure plasma from the robot. He could keep the heat off of him just enough to stop himself from frying, but he didn’t know how long he could hold it up for.

…but the fire stopped at just the moment he started to falter, letting him catch his breath. There was a little click from behind the bot – maybe he was finally out of fuel – but it stayed there for a while, doing absolutely nothing more. “Run,” it managed after a while, in that same flat voice.

Vir blinked and shook his head, grabbing his now-discarded cape and donning it again. “Excuse me, crazy evil automaton?”

“Run,” it said again, and then it dropped off the table with a heavy thunk, treads tearing up the space between the two of them.
Great, he thought, as he ran off into the halls. Now more of his tower would be toasted. That, and there was probably some shred of actualMedik in that robot, which made destroying it that much more dangerous. Who knew how well or poorly he had handled his own intellectual identity? It was as easy as him hitting cut and paste instead of copy. He threw himself along faster and faster, and slid into the kitchen instead of the library, considering himself pretty smart and quick-thinking for dodging the destruction of numerous valuable tomes. Instead a missile impacted the cabinet behind him and sent boxes of sugary cereal into the air.

“And maybe I just won’t refill your stupid breakfast food and you can suffer my omelet skills instead!” he yelled behind him, ducking behind the island-counter in the center of the room. More missiles came flying by, smashing into the produce rather than his head. He snuck a peek over the counter and saw the jackalbot covered in leaves of lettuce glaring down at him with those razorlike, red eyes. It was harder to take it seriously, but considering it had a rocket fist warming up on its left side, it was impossible to completely laugh it off.

Virmir hid back down again before he got a fist-shaped hole in his face. Said hand went flying into the wall, splintering the wood all around it. He waited there for a second longer, expecting it to fly back or something… but it didn’t fly back, and there weren’t any more attacks. For a precious while, anyway. “Get up and blast me,” the roboMedik said, with static coating its voice. “It’s okay.”

The fire mage seized up, looking about him for any threats before he allowed himself to think on that. “Blast you? You want me to blast you? You realize that I don’t have a clue where your old body is, and for all I know, this whole rampage might have corrupted that data on the computer!”

“It’s under the workshop desk,” it said, and then the static cut out. Once more it came bearing down upon Virmir, other fist at the ready, now shaped up like a massive cutlass. “Removing second directive.”

“If you had just blasted told me at first,” he complained, and then threw a fireball at the sword as it headed between his eyes.
It crumbled and melted to the wrist, pouring down on his cape dramatically. He briefly wondered if it could recombine or goop back together like that one taurminator movie he’d heard of once, but didn’t bother waiting to see. He threw fireball after fireball into the mechajackal, roasting the electronics and metal that made it up. The limbs went first, followed by the torso with the gaping hole in its chest, and then the head, gathering in a sad puddle of molten trash. It sparked and withered, and may have been trying to speak, but he didn’t listen if it was talking. He burned it over and over until there was nothing left… and there was a hole in the floor.



Medik grumbled in his new jar, the modulated voicebox accurately capturing how annoyed he was. “Oh come on! You didn’t install any games on my system?!”

Virmir smiled in his seat, drawing peacefully now that all he had to do was wait on some 3D printing to finish. It was much less worrisome than tons of metal that could be shaped however it wanted itself to be. He glanced over at Medik’s screen, an empty desktop with only art and writing programs, as well as a few books, available as icons. “You’re going to be productive for the time and money you cost me with your robotic rampage, whether you were in control or not. Besides, you can’t mess up any inputs with your limbs if you don’t have any. It’ll all be projected right from your brain. You just have to learn how to do that.”
The brain sloshed about in its jar, grumbling again. “No fair! I didn’t do anything wrong! At least put me back in my body!”

Vir hummed… and shrugged. “You wanted to see what it was like to be in a robot body without any weird data corruptions, so you’ll have it. Just for a day. When it finishes printing. Then I’ll have to make sure your organic body is all fine and ready after this little episode…”

More grumbling, whining, and complaining erupted from the same voicebox. “I thought it would be cool to have my brain in a jar to show people, not actually BE the brain in the jar!” The programs on the screen opened and closed rapidly, his only way of showing frustration other than voicing it.

“Oh, put your anger in your art,” his mentor offered. “I hear emotion channels really well into stuff like that.”

The jar hopped, but couldn’t do much more than that, and sat dejectedly at a blank document.



Virmir

  • Chaotic Neutral Cartoon Gray Fox Mage
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Reply #2 on: May 18, 2016, 12:49:29 AM
Ha ha, I love the punishment at the end.  This is a pretty strange story!  It comes off as mildly disturbing in parts, which I think was what you're going for.  You got that turning into a horrifying monster theme going on with cartoon silliness, which is a pretty hard thing to mix.  But I put you up to this strange challenge and I think you handled it rather well given the guidelines!

[fox] Virmir