genessia | Low on self esteem, so you run on gasoline.

Genos was less than sure about how these lessons would go. Saitama was excited and very optimistic, but Genos didn't see how this would benefit him in the long run. Yet he'd already agreed to do it and it could have some short term benefits...

He noticed the problem as soon as he stepped inside. It was hard to miss that a large mechanical suit was both missing and also turned to goop.

"Sabotage?" he asked, his frown growing more severe as he stared at the hardsuit puddle.

"No, it..." Priss dragged a hand across her face, and finally moved further into the room. She stepped very carefully over a tendril of the puddle. "It can do that. Remember when I said it used to pour on? Don't touch it though, it may try to eat you. Innermetal doesn't play nicely with other materials."

Including carpet... or anything else that wasn't its containment unit or its Knight, honestly. And even then, it had been exceedingly painful when poured onto open wounds.

Priss just hoped it wouldn't eat through everything below the carpet, too. It was already going to be an unexpected repair bill she'd be footing.

She set the guitars down, one at a time, where they'd be safe. "I don't know why it's doing that now. The damn thing didn't come with a manual, and I barely got to use this version before Galatea took off for space and we chased after her."

Maybe her not using it for a day was enough to let it revert? Maybe it was more damaged than she'd thought? Priss had no idea. She'd barely given the suit any thought today, other than her usual frustration over not knowing how to fix it.

Edited 2016-07-02 07:59 (UTC)

Genos was willing to heed her warning and kept a safe distance from the puddle. He had no idea what it might do if it came in contact with his very different robotic body. With no reliable mechanic yet, he couldn't be as reckless as he usually was. The warning did not stop him from crouching nearby and scanning the puddle, however. He couldn't miss the chance to examine it while it was in this state.

"Is there some way to contain it? Would it react to you touch? Given that it's poured on, it would react with contact to you wouldn't it?" He didn't know how it worked but he could makes some guesses.

"Probably," Priss agreed, crouching down as well and pulling off her half-gloves. "If it tries to crawl up my arms or something, step outside for a bit, would you? It'll eat my clothes." There was no telling, after all, if it had to be poured on or if it would just climb right onto her.

She shrugged off her jacket, too, having just found one she actually liked, and tossed the gloves and it back to the guitars. That left her arms bare, since she'd found very similar clothes to her usual stuff back on Earth.

Priss carefully passed a hand over the puddle, not touching yet. It reacted to her presence, rippling like she was dragging her hand through still water. It was rearranging itself on an atomical level in response to her presence. "Weird stuff, isn't it? I don't know what the containment unit Nigel used with it was made of, so I have no idea how to contain it other than hoping I can turn it back into something solid."

"You could test its reaction to various materials," Genos suggested, his attention still fixed on the puddle. "That could take quite some time and there's no guarantee that it's not a unique substance that's used to contain it."

If that was the case there would be no way to run tests on the melted hardsuit even if Priss allowed that. Even compared to all the bizarre creatures and super powered humans he was used to, this innermetal was incredibly different. It wasn't so much a mix of organic and non-organic but something that stood completely outside either. There weren't any living things that could liquidize and then reform to a complex being.

"Yeah," Priss tried to use both hands to see if she could coax it into moving without touching it. It continued to ripple, and swell directly under her palms, but it didn't move the bulk of it. "I'll test out different materials later. Especially if it's going to revert to this whenever it's left alone for long enough."

The Knight steeled herself and finally lowered a hand to touch the surface of the goop. It rippled even more intensely in response, but didn't try to climb up her arm. "This stuff was a bitch getting poured onto open wounds, let me tell you. Hydrogen peroxide is nothing by comparison." But she'd done it anyway, of course.

She moved her hand around, trailing her fingertips in the goop as she considered what to try doing. Could she focus on the hardsuit and have it form without being around her?

Genos was intensely curious as he watched the innermetal puddle react. He looked even more intent than usual as he stared at her hand.

"I imagine you don't know it composition," he said, trying to think of whatever chemical makeup could have anything act like this suit did. "It doesn't form in parts then? Just all at once?"

Priss blinked, hard, and then rocked back onto her heels, staring at Genos in surprise.

Genos stared back, he was good at that. Why she was giving him that look, he had no idea, he hadn't said anything wrong had he? Usually he wouldn't care- or notice- but he had an interest in staying on her good side.

"Yes?" he asked after a pause.

"Forming in parts," Priss said finally, blinking again and seeming to snap out of it. "That's it. You figured out what it's doing."

Kind of. Without even meaning to! She turned her attention back to the goop.

"I was frustrated about not being able to work on it when I left this morning, it must have responded. But since I don't know what I want it to do, it just did it halfway."

She traced her hand over the surface of the innermetal again.

"One time, I walked into the hangar while these suits were being made, and Nigel and Mackie were working on five boomers. Big, bulky things. I asked them why there were five instead of four, and they told me those were all for one hardsuit."

Priss reached into the goop with both hands and grasped something, standing to pull out... an arm? It was attached to the rest of a boomer, boxy and green, but it was too heavy for her.

"Shit, this is heavy. Help me pull this out?" The arm was clean of 'innermetal', so it was safe to touch. Innermetal was forming the boomer as it was pulled free, solidifying it as it left the puddle.

Genos was starting to learn that he shouldn't expect anything in particular when it came to the technology of Priss' world. None of this made a lick of sense. Instead of dwelling on that, he helped pull the very heavy boomer out of the puddle, steadying it as it formed entirely.

"This is what a typical model looks like?" he asked, looking it over. "They can be merged together? Can they not reject each other like a body would reject a transplant?"

Edited 2016-07-03 06:45 (UTC)

"Yeah, that's a typical model. That looks like a Class-B, a worker drone."

Priss crouched back down, digging her hands around in the innermetal, but more boomers weren't so effortlessly forthcoming. The puddle had shrunk by almost exactly one fifth. "Looks like that's the only damaged part. You can just set it down somewhere, I doubt it'll stay on its feet on its own."

She rocked back onto her heels again, and stood. "Boomers can all merge, they're all... clones of each other, remember? Even if they look very different. This one doesn't have a core, of course, so it's just... parts."

Parts which at least looked more like something Genos would be familiar with. The bulky 'worker drone' had visible bolts and hoses and it surely had wiring under its protective plating. It was humanoid, but it otherwise didn't try to pass as human in any way.

It smelled a little... scorched. Burned wiring, at the very least.

Genos propped the lifeless boomer against a wall carefully. How dense must that puddle be to have the material to make something like this? It must be obscenely heavy material, even this boomer was heavier than it should be. He was busy looking it over the best he could without opening anything when he got around to answering Priss.

"The core is both power source and partially the brain?" There were so many more questions to ask. "I'm still struggling to grasp how they function, I don't even see why they bother to form like this when they don't have to. If this is a clone with no core, how does it know to take this shape? Or to retake this shape when in need of repair? How does it become un-merged? Does it have information of its own for this shape that's seperate from the dna like coding that allows it to merge without being rejected?"

"No, it's just the... brain," Priss tried to gather the puddle up into a smaller area, at least. It had eaten all the way through to concrete! Good thing she was on the ground floor. "--Damn. Anyway, some would say it's the consciousness more than the brain, since there's programming on top of it, but I don't see a difference. You crush a boomer's core, it dies. If it was just consciousness it would just turn into a... well, robot."

The Knight stood up for a third time and stepped away from the puddle. "They're manufactured to form like that. This one probably worked in utilities of some sort, since it's green. It had a core, once, but Nigel and Mackie took it out. So it's kind of like... a hollow boomer body. Like if you had a spare that was all ready to use but you weren't in it yet."

God that was a lot of questions!

"The innermetal is what unmerged it, at my cue. It's... it's complex, I don't have all the answers. Or if I do, they're locked up with that download. Anyway, rejection isn't such an issue like with biological tissue, I've seen rogue boomers absorb whole factories. Cars. Computers. A rogue boomer could even try to absorb you, since so much of you is metal. I've had them try to absorb the hardsuit, too."

There was a long pause as Genos processed all that. He couldn't even fathom where one would start to develop this level of technology. Priss' explanations brought forth far more questions than answered. He could only ask her so much considering she was a polit, not a builder, and there was the matter of her agitating the information now stored in her brain unwillingly... It was so tempting to know more but he had to be careful. He really hated having to be careful.

"So I really should not touch the puddle, just in case." Saitama would still need him around, he couldn't risk getting absorbed by a horrendously dense puddle of goop. He turned the arm of the boomer over, still examining it closely. "Do the cores survive once separated?"

"Yeah, definitely don't touch the puddle," Priss agreed. "I don't have anything here that could hack a limb off you to save the rest."

The question of whether the cores survived was an interesting one.

"They should," Priss approached, arms folded, but didn't seem to care that he was inspecting the boomer closely. "They're not biological brains, after all. I imagine it's like they're in a... coma, basically. Not aware, not thinking or feeling. Just... in stasis. I'm sure they got absorbed in whatever storage they were in when Galatea essentially merged with the whole city."

Remembering a past fight, she snorted. "I saw one take over an island once, too. You can see why the Knight Sabers were needed. The boomers got a raw deal, but we couldn't let random innocent people get killed because of it. It's too bad we couldn't rescue the boomers from humans, too. They certainly needed it."

"They are immensely powerful," Genos commented as he frowned down at the boomer. "I'm surprised anyone assumed they could control them for long as they could. Their strength didn't develop on its own did it?"

At this point, he'd believe it. Nothing about the boomers made sense, afterall. In a way it did but still, there was still so much he couldn't quite grasp. There was so much to them.

"Do the absorbed pieces loose all sense of self or do they become like your suit?" He still had more questions but just these for now.

"They lose sense of self," Priss said it with certainty. "And everyone thought these to be simple machines until they started to go rogue. Why not make them so strong? They re-built Tokyo in a fraction of the time it would have taken humans. The lab that released the first prototypes and the technology didn't tell anyone that the boomers were people with restrictions in place. Restrictions that would eventually snap under the burden of madness."

Priss lifted the boomer's other hand, turning over the arm to expose an access panel. She didn't have the tools, she'd need to fix that.

"The hardsuit is a special case, it was made to bond to me. Only people with similar brain structures to Sylia can bond to a hardsuit like that and unlock its full potential. My predecessors didn't have that bond, and they all died in under a half-dozen missions."

Dangerous work, to be sure. She let the arm drop back down.

"And then there's Moto, who was also made to be bonded to me. I don't know how that works... maybe we'll get to ask him someday, if he even knows."

Always 'he', not 'it'.

"Was the hardsuit itself to blame for their deaths or its potential being limited by the lack of a bond?" A valid question he felt, given what he knew of boomers so far, this bond wasn't like the connection between his brain and body. He stood, looking down at the arm that had the access panel. Without his own tools, he couldn't offer to help.

"I'm guessing that Moto is a similarly advanced as the hardsuit?" That was another of the boomers he'd like to see in action some day.

"The potential being limited. They couldn't keep up with their opponents," Priss shook her head, "Sylia picked people with some impressive skills, but they just couldn't achieve a full connection."

Priss glanced over at the chunks of red metal still on the dresser. "Moto might be more advanced," she admitted, "in a lot of ways. He's a complete boomer, or will be when he's rebuilt. His own core... all of it. He's only bound to me insofar as I'm who he listens to." Not unlike Genos with his sensei, in some ways.

"...You came for guitar lessons," she added with an amused snort, "and here we are going on about boomers. Though to be fair to both of us, the hardsuit melting was a little distracting."

"It was the more pressing issue." Still was, as far as Genos was concerned. He wanted to continue the questioning but he did come over here for a reason. A reason he was barely interested in to begin with, delaying it would only make it harder to focus. The innermetal puddle wasn't helping his focus either.

"If there's nothing to be done about the state of the hardsuit or that-" He pointed to the boomer against the wall. "-should we start?"

"Yeah, I don't have any tools yet. I should fix that later," Priss gathered a couple chairs from the room's table and set them down near the guitar cases. "You're not too heavy for this furniture, right? The suit definitely is. Not much I can sit on when I'm geared up."

She knelt down at the cases and opened one of them up. Inside was a perfectly nice acoustic guitar. "I'll teach you electric, too," she offered the delicate wooden instrument up. It had a strap already on it. "But let's start with acoustic. I did the strings in the shop, but I have a bunch of extras if you end up snapping any."

This might have been easier if he wasn't just stuck with his combat arms. Genos had a good grasp on his own strength, however, so was confident he wouldn't snap too many strings. As for the fate of the chair, hopefully it would be fine if he kept still. It did creak when he sat down.

"I'm not near as heavy as the suit." He took the guitar carefully and looped the strap over his shoulders. "I did research on how to play this last night, on the suggestion of my sensei."

It had been several hours of intensely staring at a screen after Saitama mentioned how cool he found the idea.

Priss pulled the other guitar from its case, and took the other chair. Chairs without arms were good for guitar practice! "Well that's good, I'm glad you're taking initiative," Priss started tuning her guitar, showing Genos how if he didn't know from his research. "What did your sensei think of you joining a rock band?"

Genos did know how to do it already but he watched her movements and tripped to replicate them to the best of his ability. She was his teacher in this regard, so he would do the best to imitate her. As long as what she said made sense.

"He was very enthusiastic about it actually." Genos was still baffled about why Saitama was so pleased by the idea but he didn't question it. "He told me this is something I should definitely do and that he would be very pleased if I did so. So I will do my best to learn. I believe Saitama sensei sees some value in this that will aid my overall training. He did mention this was a good opportunity to learn without breaking anything."

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