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odditycollector · 6 years

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[ @nightpool asked: Agatha and the gang (or some subset of the characters thereof) hijack a Justice]

I originally answered this ask properly but the readmore broke so maybe this will work.

The bodies were strewn over the corridor in a variety of entertainingly awkward poses. They still smelled alive – mostly – but the entire swarming army had collapsed the instant Agatha shut down the mind of the airship.

Yeah, yeah, okay. So it wasn’t an airship, what with there being no air on the outside of it. But acknowledging the idea of a Nothing-ship set his temples throbbing, and Dimo was NOT going to think about it until events inevitably set that up to be the only way to stop everyone from dying.

Agatha killed the ship several hours ago, and none of the bodies had moved since. So they were nothing but puppets, but if they worked like humans as much as they looked like humans they were going to have problems pretty quick, being all bent over with elbows under their asses or heads tangled up in their knees. The blood was going to get stopped up in there.

That was fine with him. Damn creepy empty-eyed puppet things. They were tough to kill, yes, but no fun to fight even so. There wasn’t enough personality in them.

But… as soon as Agatha got the ship in her control, they’d be HER creepy puppet soldiers. And Dimo could really use some properly functioning fighting guys as as backup. Not so many that he couldn’t tear them apart one-and-a-half handed – just in case something new was waiting to go wrong on him – but at least a few seconds’ worth of cannon fodder that wouldn’t just fall over first thing because their feet stopped working.

From the room to his side, there was a clang, a shuffle like dominoes falling, and the first few threads of soft humming that could still, at this early stage, have been mistaken for music. The sound folded, twisting over itself into a chorusing atonal braid: that low, familiar vibration that raised the fur under his collar and rattled in the space between his fingertips and claws.

An enemy army slept at his feet, and he yearned that it would awaken so he could put it down properly, not clean Spark magic but fangs in throat and the Horde around him and the blood-slimed spoils of battle dragged back for the Masters….

But there were no other Jaegers here, and the most memorable moment of today’s battle had been Agatha firing a death ray through the ship and getting herself blown out into – as it turned out – Nothing, and Dimo jumping after her because what else was he supposed to do about that.

No. Wanting more fighting was stupid, and he didn’t get to be stupid anymore.

But PLANNING for more fighting, whether he wanted it or not…

The closest of the ship’s puppet soldiers was resting mid-somersault a few feet from the doorway. Dimo gently kicked it over, so that its limbs were sprawling in more or less reasonable directions. There. One down.

He was working on number three when Agatha’s cat stalked into view. “Hoy dere, kitty cat,” Dimo said.

Instead of returning the greeting, Krosp frowned at where Dimo was untangling a boot and an elbow. But you couldn’t take that sort of thing personally with cats.

“What happened to your hand?” Krosp said.

“Ho, dis ting?” Dimo examined his mechanical prosthetic, as if only just now noticing he was down two fingers and a good portion of the wrist and palm. “Ah, vell, hyu know.” He swung the thumb of his good hand at the doorway behind him. “De Mistress, she vos needink some parts.”

Dimo didn’t elaborate, therefore leaving it ambiguous whether Agatha had politely asked him if he had any extra fingers that he wasn’t particularly using at the moment and that, perchance, she might borrow if Dimo found himself so inclined; or whether Dimo had taken his attention off of her for five damn seconds to deal with a flailing tube that was starting to catch on fire, and when he had glanced down half his hand had apparently detached from his arm and walked across the room and hopped up onto her workbench all by itself.

“Uh huh,” said Krosp, who had been around enough Sparks in his short feline life that he certainly did ‘know’. “That explains why you finally let her out of your sight, anyway.”

“Hrmph. She iz a big gurl, und hy iz schtill in screaming distance,” Dimo said reasonably, and resisted the urge to immediately spin around and check on her again. “But vhere iz Miz Zeetha? Hy vos expecting her to come back vit hyu.”

“Do you remember that one section Agatha said was probably still powered on, just isolated from the rest of the ship?”

“Yah, sure.”

“Yeah. We looked into it after talking to the prisoners. Most of it was a training room, with moving targets and armoured clank arms, but it was all going haywire without the main brain to control it. Zeetha stayed to,” Krosp rolled his eyes up, as if reading her words from the air above Dimo’s hat, “manually shut them off. For good.”

Dimo nodded at this. “So Miz Zeetha iz fighting clenks, und hyu iz running interrogations,” he mused, “und hy iz tucking dese guys verra nicely into sleepytime.” He kicked over the next soldier maybe a little less carefully than he could have.

“Right,” Krosp said. “About that. Shouldn’t you be finishing them off, not fixing them? They’re practically revenants.”

“Hy dunno,” Dimo said. “Dey’ve got a sheep for brainz, but it depends how it got in dere, yah? Besides,” he added with alarming cheerfulness, “dey’s Miz Agatha’s revenants now, so ve gots to ask her first bout shtuff like dot!”

Krosp’s his tail swished unhappily back and forth. There were implications in Dimo’s last statement that Krosp liked even less than Dimo did, but he was too smart to be baited into an argument.

And what the hell was Dimo doing, trying to start one?

Agatha’s humming was still growing in complexity, and Dimo could now hear the subtle way it changed with every noise he and the cat made. Reflecting their words or nullifying them. Dimo was growling slightly, under his breath, and he recognized the vibrations through Agatha’s voice before he noticed them in his own throat.

“Hokay.” Dimo scrubbed his flesh hand over his face, like that would scrape away all the stupid hiding under there. Maybe it was hard to wait here, alone, and do nothing. But he’d done harder things. “So did dey say anytink useful?”

“What?”

“De prisoners. Dot hyu interrogated?”

The cat’s tail swished again. “I have no idea. Maybe they were giving me the personal address of the Celestial Milkman, but they don’t speak any language I’ve ever heard of.”

“Or mebbe dey do, and dey iz pretendink?”

“No,” Krosp said. “They wanted to talk to me. I’m sure of it.”

“Hoy, hy know dis one. Iz it cuz hyu iz a cute kitty?”

“Yes, exactly! I’m adorable! And Zeetha is terrifying! But here’s what I did get. This place is called ‘Radch’.”

Dimo rolled that one around his memories. He’d been a lot of places but: “Neffer heard ov it.”

“Neither have I. Just like they’ve never heard of Europa. Or England. Or Africa. Or even America.”

“Dem,” Dimo said. “Ve IZ far away. Dis von’t be an easy one.”

Krosp said, “But there’s one more thing they managed to communicate. Apparently these people have an alliance of some kind with someone called the ‘Presger’.”

“Neffer heard ov dem eiffer.”

“I know,” said Krosp, “but they really, REALLY wanted us to know that. I don’t understand it, and I don’t like it.”

“Vell, tink ov de bright side, hey? Mebbe dese Presgers iz more fun to punch den de puppet guys.” For illustration, Dimo nudged another limp body until its head rolled out of its armpit.

“Sometimes,” Krosp said, “I honestly can’t tell if you’re serious or not.”

Dimo had a short bit of clowning he was tempted to launch into - Ho, ho, I iz not serious, I iz Dimo! - but Agatha spared him.

Her humming was interrupted by a loud banging and a short surprised “hah!”. Krosp’s ears flicked. “Aren’t you going to make sure she didn’t start another fire?”

“No, iz hokay,” Dimo said. He still heard Agatha’s movement and smelled only cold blood from some of the puppet soldiers.

There was another prolonged crashing, this one followed by maniacal laughter and a 'ZAAAPPP’.

Dimo sniffed again. “Dere hyu go,” he said to the cat. “NOW dere iz a fire.”

And then Agatha ran out of the doorway, with flushed cheeks and a full madgirl grin, and Dimo saw exactly WHAT she had set on fire.

Agatha’s gaze darted around the hallway, and seemed to land on him only by chance. “Dimo! Do you KNOW what electricity is?”

“YEZ!” Dimo grabbed the jacket from a puppet soldier and tore it free, sending the body flying. “It iz de bright blue ting wot goes ZAP and den hyu iz on fire!”

“WRONG!” Agatha roared in triumph. “Electricity is not a THING! It is merely movement, but of what? OF WHAT? Of NOTHING! Merely a mathematical analog of what we have so naively called probabilistic– WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! HOW **DARE** YOU ATTACK ME!!!!!”

“I iz not attacking hyu!” Dimo snarled plaintively. “I iz attacking DE FIRE.”

“FIRE? HAH! BUT THERE IS NO SUCH THING” - She grabbed Dimo by the collar and slammed him into the wall. - “AS FIRE!!”

Dimo was out of the practice of cringing, at least in any sort of satisfying manner, but he probably did a fair approximation as he tried to simultaneously angle his hat away from the flames crawling down Agatha’s jacket arm, and his face from the device she was clutching in her other hand. It had recently been his pinkie finger, but Dimo assumed it had been turned into a death ray by now.

“Fire is only a word for the sufficiently rapid chemical oxidative process, but there are layers of reality beneath the chemical, beneath the energetic – AHAHAHAHA! As if those were in truth different things! – and I have seen once more what I have seen and forgotten. There are layers and levels and layers of fundamental forces we have scarcely dared to imagine and FIRE is merely a REORDERING OF INFORMATION!”

A terrible, but belatedly obvious possibility was blooming in Dimo’s brain like one of the Red Heterodyne’s flesh eating fungus bombs.

“Ah, Mistress,” he started carefully. “Does hyu VANT to be on fire?”

Agatha blinked. The question had thrown off the rhythm of her ranting. “I– What?”

“Vot?”

Her eyes drifted away from his face. She had broken from the madness place enough to notice the flames reaching up her jacket, and was staring at them like they were distantly reminding her of something or other.

Then her eyes went suddenly wide. “Ahh!” She dropped Dimo and swung her flaming arm away from him. “Ow! Ow!”

“Hokay!” Now THIS was a problem he was set up to solve. Dimo grabbed the jacket’s burning sleeve and ripped it off at the shoulder.

Not too many moments later, Zeetha jogged into view. She had a bar of jointed metal swung over her back as an impromptu souvenir.

“Hello then, what are we up to?” she offered in happy greeting. “I smell barbeque!”

Krosp swept his arm across the hallway. Dimo was jumping up and down on a smoldering piece of once-white cloth while Agatha, wearing the other half of the labcoat, frowned at a suspiciously familiar metal finger sticking out of a shifting pyramidal block.

“Good news,” Krosp intoned. “Agatha disproved fire.”

#girl genius #ramble #nightpool #ancillary justice

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