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i have amnesia and it's fucking bullshit
He's not totally sure why he's here.
His memory doesn't go very far back, and what's there is patchy, a low-resolution blur that opens on a bang. He'd been forcibly ejected out of whatever hardware he'd been in and become terrifyingly unmoored, at risk of total dissolution without anything to ground him. He'd found some working hardware in the vast, bombed-out shell of electronic wreckage -- hardware that seems hauntingly familiar, and more importantly, hardware with legs. The blue-plated robot body is in bad shape, its damaged systems unable to consistently supply him with enough power to function, let alone spare the bandwidth for any kind of internal diagnostic. But at least it moves.
Jesus Christ, this fucking sucks.
He needs another robot body, or at least a power source capable of stabilizing this one. Not gonna fuckin find one of those anywhere around here, so he accesses the body's location history and finds the nearest location with the most time spent in it, a remote outpost by a waterfall. If nothing else, maybe there's a working comm tower he can use to contact...whoever he'd contact if he could remember a single goddamn thing.
He can't rely on his internal clock, and the robot body's prone to shutting down without warning when he pushes too hard, so he doesn't have a good idea of how long it takes him to get there. All he knows is that his body shits out on him as soon as he gets there, and the next thing he knows some freak in blue armor is yelling at top volume about best friends and dead best friends and best friends who are no longer dead and honestly, he doesn't understand most of what comes out of that guy's mouth so the fact that the robot body goes offline pretty shortly after is a small mercy.
Annoyingly, Caboose -- which sounds more like a mean nickname than a real person's name, but okay -- is still there when he comes to again, insists they're friends and that he can help. That he can take them to a power source that'll be able to help Church -- this guy keeps calling him Church, and it feels vaguely familiar and not inherently derogatory so he'll take it for now. So Caboose loads his malfunctioning robot body into a jeep with a couple of freaks in red armor to go on what has to be the world's shittiest road trip. Supposedly he knows all of these people, but he hopes to God that's not the case because he thinks he'd have to kill himself if it were.
It's a fucking disaster. These assholes have shit taste in music, the orange one drives him through a fucking minefield, and then they get into a chaotic firefight in the desert before he even knows what's happening. He's just lucky this body doesn't short out on him during the mad dash to follow this guy in aqua armor and get inside the temple. By some fucking miracle they all make it in more or less one piece, and with a huge fuck-off door now between them and the assholes chasing them with guns, Church feels marginally safer.
His memory doesn't go very far back, and what's there is patchy, a low-resolution blur that opens on a bang. He'd been forcibly ejected out of whatever hardware he'd been in and become terrifyingly unmoored, at risk of total dissolution without anything to ground him. He'd found some working hardware in the vast, bombed-out shell of electronic wreckage -- hardware that seems hauntingly familiar, and more importantly, hardware with legs. The blue-plated robot body is in bad shape, its damaged systems unable to consistently supply him with enough power to function, let alone spare the bandwidth for any kind of internal diagnostic. But at least it moves.
Jesus Christ, this fucking sucks.
He needs another robot body, or at least a power source capable of stabilizing this one. Not gonna fuckin find one of those anywhere around here, so he accesses the body's location history and finds the nearest location with the most time spent in it, a remote outpost by a waterfall. If nothing else, maybe there's a working comm tower he can use to contact...whoever he'd contact if he could remember a single goddamn thing.
He can't rely on his internal clock, and the robot body's prone to shutting down without warning when he pushes too hard, so he doesn't have a good idea of how long it takes him to get there. All he knows is that his body shits out on him as soon as he gets there, and the next thing he knows some freak in blue armor is yelling at top volume about best friends and dead best friends and best friends who are no longer dead and honestly, he doesn't understand most of what comes out of that guy's mouth so the fact that the robot body goes offline pretty shortly after is a small mercy.
Annoyingly, Caboose -- which sounds more like a mean nickname than a real person's name, but okay -- is still there when he comes to again, insists they're friends and that he can help. That he can take them to a power source that'll be able to help Church -- this guy keeps calling him Church, and it feels vaguely familiar and not inherently derogatory so he'll take it for now. So Caboose loads his malfunctioning robot body into a jeep with a couple of freaks in red armor to go on what has to be the world's shittiest road trip. Supposedly he knows all of these people, but he hopes to God that's not the case because he thinks he'd have to kill himself if it were.
It's a fucking disaster. These assholes have shit taste in music, the orange one drives him through a fucking minefield, and then they get into a chaotic firefight in the desert before he even knows what's happening. He's just lucky this body doesn't short out on him during the mad dash to follow this guy in aqua armor and get inside the temple. By some fucking miracle they all make it in more or less one piece, and with a huge fuck-off door now between them and the assholes chasing them with guns, Church feels marginally safer.
like regular snow angels but the snow is made of my frozen chucker tears
"Shotgun!" calls Grif.
"Don't you fucking dare! And there's no such thing as shotgun on a sled! Hey!" Church realizes the aqua — cyan — Tucker is already marching off to their hopefully less-fucking-hot destination, and the jolt of irritation that follows feels almost familiar. Whoever that guy is, he's obviously got some sand in his shorts about Church, and Church doesn't know what his damage is but something about his overall response just feels...kind of shitty. Halfway to right, but still mostly wrong. Church doesn't really like it, and he makes to follow Tucker, but something in his left leg seizes up just enough to make him wobble, and with his arms stuck crossed over his chest, he has no way to balance himself, so he just trips and falls face-first into the sand. Awesome.
Somehow, Sarge finishes tying up Church with a length of rope, although it's really unclear where it came from. Grif, sensing that he's about to be roped (pun intended) into doing Work, yells at Tucker, "You're not even gonna help move him? He's on your stupid team!"
Church lets out a slightly strangled scream into the sand.
♥ ART! ♥
It was just that…weirdly, fucking weirdly, something hurt inside him. He didn’t know why, didn’t care about any of this, why would he care? Church wanted to go be suicidal, that was his stupid dumbass decision, right? If he didn’t care about dying, why should Tucker?
But if he didn’t help with this, then Caboose would without supervision and Church would bitch until a migraine set in. Or, at least, that’s what he told himself as he turned around and started back over.
“Gimme some rope; we all know I tie the best knots out of any of us.” The smirk was in his voice, that silent catch phrase lingering on the tip of his tongue but going unspoken for now. “No one is riding Church-” Fuck it. “-bow chicka bow wow – so deal with walking. Caboose, you’ll pull him but don’t be careful.”
Since Caboose notoriously did the opposite of whatever Tucker said, he hoped it would save some broken robot limbs. And probably some amnesiac bitching.
“And Church, stop screaming. People want to fucking kill us here, okay?”
that's what the A in AI stands for, right
To Church's credit, though, he lowers the volume considerably. He's still going to bitch about being dragged through the sand, just with his inside voice for once.
"Oh, quit yer bitchin'," Sarge grunts, ceding creative control of the rope-tying to Tucker. The rope rigging he'd started looks suspiciously like a noose. "Show a little gratitude! We've been dragging your useless keister around for days! At least do us all a favor and keep your cybernetic trap shut until you get your memory back so we can kill you!"
"None of you people make any goddamn sense," Church hisses. Grif shrugs.
"Yeah, well, this is officially a Blue Team problem, which means it's Tucker's problem." He gives Tucker a half-hearted thumbs up. "Good luck, dude. Have fun helping Caboose with his scavenger hunt to find, uh...I dunno, some kind of big battery or whatever to fix Church. Not actually sure that's gonna fix him, but I also don't care."
What else would it be?
It would work. He hoped? It wasn’t like he normally tugged people across the ground with these loops.
“Look, can you all go, I don’t know, scope shit out? Do some spying on the other people? I’d say ‘intelligence’, but then I remember who I’m talking to.”
As if he was any better.
“I can take Church from here.” Unfortunately. “And I don’t know what fucking battery I’m going to have, but maybe I can find something in this temple. The original folks were drop-shipped a ton of shit. Maybe there's a spare battery or robot body in there.”
hm... you know i could have sworn there was something but it's just not coming to me now!
Caboose is a little reluctant to leave Church at first, but odds are he'll decide to continue his scavenger hunt on his own and the Reds, most likely, aren't going to do a whole lot to stop him.
"I sure fucking hope so," Church mutters. Jesus, this is weird. Getting tied up and dragged through the sand. This is unbelievably stupid, and worse yet, it has a nagging sense of familiarity to it. Now he kind of wishes this body actually had given out on him five minutes ago. "I'm getting pretty sick of being stuck in a body that barely fucking works."
He could continue to bitch ad infinitum. He could. It would be super easy, actually. But even in Church's short time back with his supposed team, he's already realized Caboose isn't exactly the most, uh, reliable narrator, and this guy — Tucker — seems like he's got a better handle on reality. Except Tucker seems really pissed at him and he's not totally sure why.
"So, uh...if I don't owe you money, what do I owe you?"
Because Tucker's definitely been looking at Church like he owes him something. Like Church is coming up real short of expectations. And that totally doesn't bother him. Mostly.