Week 27, Late Friday Night, Directly After The Mission: Post-Plasma

About five hours ago, Sosie's Biostatus monitor went flat. After a quick smeakering to say she was okay--and being a bit tight lipped on the details--Sosie showed up at home. She parked the Mungo, slightly shame faced, and walked inside, mumbling softly in Korean.

There were a few.. changes. One, she looked horrible. She was about six inches taller. The body attached to her head was emaciated, dressed in a oversized hoodie, and shaped distinctly more masculine..ly. She made her way into the kitchen quietly, ignoring the sudden serious butterfly of her daughter who watched her quizzically. With unfamiliar hands, she began shoving food guiltily into her mouth. After a few moments of noshing, she looked at her daughter with sadly amused eyes. "The mission had a couple of.. complications."

It had taken him two weeks but Ace was finally home. His time in the Pacific had not been what one could call fun, but it was very enlightening and Ace came home feeling very good about himself and about the world. The islands of the Pacific were ravaged by the wave but the people were in a much better state now. It has been a busy few weeks, but now he was home and planned to spend some time relaxing before heading out again to do some more good in the world.

As he drove his van towards the compound he couldn't help but notice something has changed about the place. The profile of the building was wrong, it was almost as if... as if someone had built a helipad on the roof. With a few whispered words Ace cleared a takeoff slot, started the Oracle 'copter and commanded it to fly over and have a better look. Ace's next thought was to climb the roof and have a look for himself, but after a moments consideration he thought better of it. It was Sosie's building so the best thing to do would be to ask her about it, and see if there was a way up from the inside. Ace parked his van and entered the building.

"Anyone home?" he called into the house as he made his way up to his room to drop off a bag full of things.

Sosie continued keeping her eyes on Bell's face as she heard Ace come in. She smiled a little sadly at her daughter and removed a tub of the pink "sno-ball" pastries she adored. She bit into one and left the fridge. She flopped onto the couch as Ace walked by, mouth full. She could hear him putting things in his room, and only after that did she speak. "Hey. I am. Bell is."

Dressed in baggy clothes, curled up by the cushions, she didn't seem.. as out of place in her new body, but her hands were much thinner, a few shades more pale, bony, fingers short. There were a few faded brown stains on her fingers. Chemical? Burns? She grinned a little sheepishly and picked her head up. "You don't look so great, buddy."

Ace barely glanced at Sosie as he walked past, mealy lifting one hand up in a slight wave. It wasn't until he was in his room and having just unzipped his bag that Ace noticed something was wrong. She looked like she belonged, she sounded almost like Sosie, his facial recognition program didn't flag up anything wrong and no-one should have been able to get into SWA past all the security but despite all that something clicked in the back of Ace's mind. In an instant his tiredness was gone as his training kicked in, albeit late. He swiftly drew his gun and left his room, pointing the large black Cougar at the figure on the couch, the figure who was, apart from the head, all wrong.

"Who are you? How did you get here?" Ace barked as he levelled the gun at the figure... who was sitting exactly like Sosie and eating a mountain of Sosie’s food. Ace did not let confusion cloud his judgement and aimed the gun at the figure. Any sudden movements and he would fire, but first he wanted to be sure he wasn't making a mistake. He didn't want to kill another of his housemates.

Oh joy. More guns pointed at me. Sosie was momentarily glad Pinkie wasn't there, as much as she wanted to see her pink haired housemate... And raised her eyebrows, meeting Ace's eyes. "Yeah, you look TERRIBLE." She smiled a little bit as a sno-ball filled hand went to her neck, and pulled back the loose neck of the hoodie. There was a jagged pink and red line across her throat where the luminescent loveliness of her normal dark skin met the anemic pale of her new body. It was an awkward fit, and any medical knowledge would show that they tried to preserve as much of Sosie's original skin as possible, but whatever it was had left horrible marks across her flesh. "Got a loaner body for the next week or two. Last one didn't make it out of the.. mission."

There was a pause, and she frowned for a moment. "You know, I don't like Warrick. I hate him, actually. He's terrible."

Ace very nearly pulled the trigger as the person's hands neckwards. So many things can be concealed behind the neck or in the lining of a garment, but he stayed his hand. It really did look like her and the brief moment of hesitation was enough for the hood to be pulled back and for Ace to see. He knew enough about medicine to know that what Sosie was saying was possible and to get pack the chip checkers and DNA locks without actually having either of those things either took one hell of a hacker or someone with an inside man. In this case Ace suspected that Bell has let her mother in, and Bell would know. Also Sosie was just doing Sosie stuff. Ace lowered the gun and pulled over a chair, never taking his eyes of her. He flopped down, suddenly looking as tired as he felt, the gun limp in his hand but not noticeably not holstered.

“Well, I’ve spent the last two weeks sleeping in a helicopter and helping people who have lost everything in the Pasific Islands. I’m tired, hungry and I’m going back soon, but that’s nothing I can’t cope with. What happened to you?”

Sosie pursed her lips for a second. "Cyberlin. Plasma cannon. Don't really feel like talking about it." She shook the bucket of pink pastries at Ace, marshmellowy outsides looking unnaturally bright and slightly sticky. "Have one. They're good. And thank you for not shooting me. This body has no augments.. other than a hideous tattoo."

She frowned a little. Her own post-tsunami efforts had been closer to home, and while she had known her housemates were out saving lives, Ace was the first one she had really.. seen the effects on. She deflected this moment of empathy by narrowing her eyes a little, and smirking. "Sleeping in a helicopter, eh? Maybe you and Darya have more in common than I thought."

Ace ran his one hand through his short cropped hair and shook his head in an effort to stay awake. "A Cyberlin? Warrick put you up against a Cyberlin? Well... I understand if you don't want to talk about it, but I want to hear all the details. It looks like it nearly killed you, you can see how that might worry me."

Ace reached out and took a few marshmallow thingies, then checked in with his internal AI to check how much calories he still needed today. All the while the gun was still loosely placed in his left hand.

“What if we need to fight another one? We need someone on the team who can... deal with a threat like that.” Ace spent a moment in contemplation, only a few seconds but after it he changed the subject. “Helicopter, yeah. Not every day, but most of the temp shelter was used for the homeless and the hungry, so I slept in the car as it were. I should probably get some sleep.” Another pause, this time longer. “What do you do about the body then? And all the cybernetics you had?”

Sosie wondered if "Don't want to talk about it" had a different meaning in the WF, but let is slide. Ace liked cyberlins, it seemed, and well.. She shook her head. "We took it down, in the end. Or, Shap and Positron and Han did. It wasn't hard... And I doubt you will have the problems with it that I did."

She frowned again, deeper, and hid her down turned mouth with another pastry.. Until the momentary subject change, at least... She knew that the casualties were minimized due to advanced planning, but the standing water, the waste.. And then the topic was was back to her body. This was on firmer ground, at least.

"Pos is cloning me a new one. But it'll take ten or so days. And cybernetics. ..Well, I have the money and time to replace them. Get better ones. Some of them were very old." She sighed, though it was hard to tell if it was nostalgic or wistful or just.. tired. "Besides, this one will have an alloy skeleton. I'll be much more.. robust." She grabbed another pastry. "..And another neck bolster. That thing saved my life."

"You took down a cyberlin? On foot? Wow. It must have been a small cyberlin." Ace took another couple of pastries and chewed them thoughtfully. "Who's Shap?"

Sosie gave Ace a long look before she spoke, disguising her frown with chewing. "Shap's a.. ..er." She paused, and gave it some thought. Had CEO Lee really hired a super hero? Or was that just a way to dress? An aesthetic choice?

"New guy. Asian guy. Likes to be called Black Spider? He's.. Interesting. Nice. ..Very nice. I like him."

"I'm sure I'll meet him at some point then. Glad to see you are not dead anyway. Cyberlins are powerful things. Far too powerful." Ace went silent for a moment, considering. Then his body seemed to slump and a half eaten pink pastry slipped from his grasp. Ace's head nodded forwards slightly as his tiredness finally got the better of him and he slipped into unconsciousness.

15 minutes later Ace's eyes slipped back open and he sat up. Seeing that Sosie was still on the sofa he turned to her "I've just remembered, did you get a Helipad installed on the roof? It looks like a helipad but I can't find any way up there."

There was the sound of a van entering the compound, before the house members who had headed over to Keelung came up the stairs, Darya first. Slumping into the living area, she flipped over a sofa head first, messed up the landing and ended up in a tangle on the sofa next to Ace. She groaned, before spinning around so her head was on his knee and stretched out.

"Ace, do I have some of cult attracting perfume on?" She asked, looking tired and grumpy. "I went over to help set stuff up, and I find that a load of the cult from Shanghai have decided to set stuff up there too. Stupid no good..." she tailed off, not liking to swear where Dusty may overhear. Sure, his mum said worse stuff, but that's why Sosie wasn't the role model.

She waved vaguely to Sosie, before snapping back. "Sosie, where's your body?" she asked, looking concerned. "Is this why your biostat went off?"

Ace's eyes went wide. A moment ago he wasn't quite awake and no sooner had he finished asking a question he was considering when something crashed into his lap. His combat reflexes kicked in and his hand went for his pistol, before the existence and identity of the head on his lap sunk in. Furthermore the head appeared to be happy where it was. Slowly Ace's facial features adopted a more natural expression, even as his mind was reeling and his stomach was slowly backflipping inside him. He had almost given up on Darya, or so he told himself. He'd tried his best with her but it seemed she wasn't interested so he had stopped trying, but now this had happened. She had chosen to put herself with her head in his lap. In his lap. Just lying there, on the couch, relaxing. With her head in his lap. And she was looking good too.

"No Darya, you smell good to me. Not like cult, I mean. Uhh." He swallowed and relaxed his hand placing it in his lap... no, she's there. Can't do that. Well, where does the hand go then. Uhhhhh. The hand dangled loose by his side, awkwardly while he tried to work out what to do with it. "Did.. Did you find much?"

Parvati had had the advantage of sleeping in the van on the drive back. Still she was exhausted and worn down. she followed Darya inside and watched her attempted acrobatics with a faint smile. As she trudges herself to a seat. She watched the pair with a pretty blank expression, too tired to find the humour in it.

Sosie's stained hands fumbled with the very new looking PDA she had retrieved from her pocket. Ace had fallen asleep mid conversation and the couch was soft, and she had settings to fix.. Hm. The death of her other phone was a problem. It had been with her for years now but.. Well, she always backed up the important data, and this was a more powerful machine, the same model as the one she had bought Pinkie.. Just more powerful. And hopefully more resistant to damage. She looked up from the small screen to Darya and Ace, and suppressing a tiny smirk, she nodded to her blonde housemate. "Yes. Two plasma canons. Pos is growing me another one. New guy, Shap, saved my life. He's.. pretty amazing." Her smirk broke into a soft smile, genuine and a little guilty. "Don't worry about it."

Using her new and thin legs, Sosie swung her legs off the couch. She cradled the bucket of fluorescent pastries close to her chest. "And yeah, Ace, that's a helipad. And there is no easy way up there." She waved the hand with her phone in it dismissively. "We'll figure a way to get to the roof that doesn't involve breaching SWA." She got to her feet. "But I need to reinstall CPSMOS on my PDA, and transfer over all my old data and apps. I'm going to do that." Sosie gave a very quick wink to Ace. "I'll be in my room if you need me."

"Uh, right. See you later, Sosie. I guess we can just, er, climb to the roof." The weight of Darya on his knee was getting uncomfortable but Ace wasn't going to ask her to move, not now. He watched Sosie leave with some concern. Had Parvati not come over he would have been on his own with Darya and would have had no idea what to do. Part of him felt a little sad that he wasn't alone with her, now he stopped to consider it, and he was slightly resentful of the fact that Parvati had arrived, but on the other hand she might be able to get him out of this mess. He lifted his dangling hand slightly, with the aim of possibly trying to stroke Darya's hair with it before catching Parvati's tired expression and just lowering the hand again, still unsure of what he was supposed to be doing.

He fumbled for words. "Uh, Hi Parvati. Are you.. Ok? You look tired. Uh.. Oh. Darya? Where did you go? With the new cult, I mean." This could be going worse, I suppose.

"New, old, whatever." Said Darya, waving her hand vaguely. "They're cult. I'll be heading back there this week to sort them out. Parvati's been doing most of the good stuff this week." she waved at her friend on the other seat, before poking around in her pockets and pulling out a nutribar. "What have you been up to?" she asked around a mouth of high calorie synthetic food.

"I've been in the south Pacific. There are a lot of islands there and they were hit badly by the earthquake and the wave, so I've been brining them aid and evacuating people. Doing whatever is necessary to save lives. I'm exhausted, but I think it's been worth it. Ms. Parvati is right, we really owe it to the world to do some good with our gifts, talents and assets."

His meandering hand finally found some courage from somewhere and pulled itself out of its dead fish impression. Ace ran his fingers slowly through Darya's hair, his finger tips lightly brushing her scalp. He looked down at her and the corners of his mouth turned up in a tender smile. "When are you heading back?"

Darya curled up slightly on the sofa, bringing her knees to her chest. She lay facing towards Ace, quietly breathing. She looked very tired, but also very young, her position being that a child may take when sad. "I was just going to grab some stuff and leave...but I'm so tired...I might stay the night here." she said finally, before putting one of her arms around Ace in an awkard hug. "It's good you helped people..." she said, before her eyes closed and she drifted off to sleep.

"You can stay here as long as you want."

She was already asleep. Ace sat there for a long moment, Darya on his lap looking so cute and innocent. He put his other arm round her, returning the half embrace, and continued stroking her head and her long hair. It wasn't long before he was also overcome with fatigue and slipped, contentedly, into a light sleep.

Parvati had almost slipped off herself, however she stifles a yawn which wakes her up a little. She had been on her feet almost constantly over the last few days. She might not have been fighting off cult with Darya but there had been the children's medical checks to do, then a food shipment had arrived three hours late and with all the guys who should have been guarding its distribution off shift she had volunteered. On a strange white tingly hard bar of something that a UIG worker with an EI accent had shoved into her hand and a cup of the worst coffee ever made she had then gone on to help with moving people out of a hospital that had been declared unsafe and into the transportation to one less likely to fall on their heads.

Still she'd had an advantage over Darya, she'd been able to sleep in the Mungo on the way back. She pulled herself to her feet and watched the pair for a long moment, but they seemed happy enough. She moved slowly to her room, paused, looked back and then slipped inside.

After a moment she reemerged and gently, with the stealth born of living in communal sleeping areas for the vast majority of her life, she moved to the pair and carefully covered darya with a blanket. She paused for a moment her sleep deprived brain trying to consider how to place the blanket over ace without suffocating Darya. Eventually she gave in and just hung it around his shoulders carefully.

Heading back to her room she smiled one last time at the pair. It was a good sight. Unity held every team together. She slipped inside, pausing only for a moment to touch the statue of Vishnu and whisper a prayer for him to guard all her friends before she collapsed into bed.

Darya groaned slightly in her sleep, her foot kicking the remote on the side of the sofa. The screen flickered into life, showing the end of a children's show. As the last character went to bed, the soft voice over said "Good night Bo. Good night Fen. Good night, everyone."

There was a soft music in the background as the lights in the show began to disappear off the screen, before finally the only light visible was the moon and stars over the town of Nyang, the setting for the show. Darya's foot kicked the remote again and it fell off the side of the bed, the screen turning off. And then the upper level of Seoul Waste Away was as quiet as it could be, broken only by the noises made by Darya as she dreamed.

She dreamed of blades for hands and eyes of steel, of cold bands holding her down, of a face she loved bending over her and beginning to cut. She dreamed of fire and blood, of crackling lightning and black, oozing oil, and in the waking world her body kicked and cried. Darya dreamed, and she pulled Ace closer, and now in her dreams she was not alone. Her earlier dreams faded, and now her dreams had familiar faces,, and she smiled. And Darya slept on.

Ace's AI screamed an alarm in his head and Ace's eyes shot open instantly. The message flashed up across his vision "Sounds of distress detected." Being woken by his Internal AI put Ace into Combat Ready Mode, which was instantly negated as he took in the surroundings and realised nothing had changed, apart from the remote being on the floor, Parvati had gone, and there was a blanket around the two of them. When Darya moved against him again and whimpered he knew why he had been woken. With an annoyed word and a slight movement of his hand he disabled his AI's Insomniac Protocol which really was giving him Insomnia by alerting him to the slightest noise. It'd need recalibrating, but that could wait for another time. Darya looked so sad curled up in his lap and as she kicked out Ace stroked her again, whispered to her and pulled her close.
"Shhh, It's ok Darya. It's ok."
Ace looked over to the Darya's room and tried to judge how he could get her to her room but soon gave up. She had pulled closer and was locked in a tight embrace, and she looked much better than before. Ace smiled warmly down at her and laid his head back against the sofa. He wasn't sure what she had been dreaming about, but whatever he had done seemed to have helped. He closed his eyes again and drifted off into a content sleep of his own. He wasn't sure if this was progress, but for now it was nice.