Log:Even Spyders Have Feelings

2020/07/06 Daemon|Slinger Grimm 1

After being trapped in an Escher painting at the art museum and having to find her way out of it and back into the real world while being hungover AF, Grimm finally staggers into her home with a bag from Spaceburger and a soda. She got all the hash browns and breakfast sandwiches they had. A pair of sunglasses shade her eyes as she sips her soda and tries to nudge the front door closed with her foot, almost tumbling over in the process.

Grimm's shaded sight will easily spot an equally hungover August, clinging to the basement ceiling working on one of the various devices he had installed to facilitate his resurrection & rebirth. Equipment that is now in various states of dismantling. He's got his mask pulled up over his nose and mouth to allow for eating, drinking and the like- but otherwise he remains garbed as 'Slinger'.

He grunts as he reaches for something below him which sets of a large bump from below when Grimm enters. Oddly, he turns to look towards Grimm when she enters the building as if he could sense her though he stops moving- falling completely silent as trying to avoid being noticed while he sorts out just who it is.

Grimm's shaded sight will easily spot an equally hungover August, clinging to the basement ceiling working on one of the various devices he had installed to facilitate his resurrection & rebirth. Equipment that is now in various states of dismantling. He's got his mask pulled up over his nose and mouth to allow for eating, drinking and the like- but otherwise he remains garbed as 'Slinger'.

He grunts as he reaches for something below him which sets of a large bump from below when Grimm enters. Oddly, he turns to look towards Grimm when she enters the building as if he could sense her though he stops moving- falling completely silent as trying to avoid being noticed while he sorts out just who it is.

Grimm halts and fishes a hashbrown from her bag and bites it ravenously. She's more than surprised to find Slinger looking back at her as she observes him with her shadow sight. That's new. Even more new is him cleaning up after himself. She vaguely remembers the previous day, but not too clearly. She slowly trudges towards the door to the basement and starts walking down the steps.

Slinger slowly pulls down his mask slowly but is otherwise still & deathly silent.

That is until his danger sense is still not going off. He isn't sure whether or not its even working at all. He hasn't had time to properly test anything damn it!

He situates himself so he will be able to web up whoever it is, hoping that the unused section of the basement he's in will go without notice.

That is until the air pressure sends a waft of those hashbrowns down the stairs ahead of Grimm.

He sniffs the air quietly and cocks his head as he slowly moves to a position where he might see more of who is coming before their head clears the upper-floor & their sight isn't obstructed.

"You planning to shoot me in my own basement?" Gabrielle quips as she takes a crunchy bite just before she's in line of sight. She's still wearing her sunglasses indoors and in the dark.

Slinger breathes an audible sigh of relief recognizing the voice and at least parts of the silhouette accompaning the Dame of Darkness.

"I wasn't sure who it was- so I was leaving my options open..." Slinger retorts as he shoots a line onto the ceiling and then lowers himself upside down from it.

He sounds rough- like he's hurting.

"I don't know what those guys put in that wine... but I'm pretty sure it started with gamma-Hydroxybutyric and ended with acid." He says by way of an icebreaker but he doesn't move for a long moment while he decides what to do.

Finally he flips off his line and returns to dismantling the various equipment required to bring a digital man to life.

Grimm gets down to the last few steps and takes a seat, slumping against the wall and eating pitifully. "Yeah." She chews more, trying to keep the greasy food down to settle her stomach.

"I'm surprised you aren't hiring people to take this out of here," she says as she finishes her first hashbrown and reaches back into her bag.

He pauses a moment before his shoulders slump. "Yeah..." He says before palming something that sounds and looks like it weighs as much as a refrigerator. He lifts it easily and moves it into an open area near the back of the slowly spreading & categorized equipment.

He shrugs. "That's how I'd rather have done it- but I'm still locked out. I've got 24 hours more to get in before I need to start worrying about... tertiary options." He sighs and his eyes hang on her a moment before he returns to the machine he's working on.

He doesn't get much further than that before he pauses, leans over against the machine and holds his head. "Also pretty sure this frame has no set tolerance for toxins outside of human norms. Going to need to revise that in the next model." He notes aloud, mostly for himself but just to keep the conversation going and off the thing that's really bothering him.

Grimm pulls out a hashbrown in a paper wrapper from her bag. "Shick. So where's your real body? How do we get you back in there? Reset your password? Oh, and thank fast," she says, giving him a chance to react before tossing the hashbrown his way.

"I wish it were that simple. I could then fold this stuff out on the resale market, use that money to buy a half dozen quantum synchronic cryptographers and boom I'd have been in in an hour. But that hardly be safe- any 12 year old with an IQ over 200 would be able to body jack me. Fun for them. Bad for business." He explains as he tries to recuperate.

He doesn't lift his head even as the hash brown flies toward him but he catches it with inhuman acuity and speed before flipping up to the ceiling to enjoy his treat.

"Thanks. These things smell amazing- before I knew it was you I was going to trade this whole rig for whatever smelled so good and safe passage from the basement." He says jokingly before using his freehand to lift his mask up halfway.

"THis is something else- I should be clear, I feel fine- but I don't think my datacluster was cleared of the Slinger personality matrix. I scrubbed the code myself a half dozen times before I procced the protocol and twice that while the trucks circled the block. My coding was flawless... or so I thought. But its clearly not if I'm still here. I still can't transfer back or out. Might as well be old meat left in the Sun..."

Grimm laugs and pulls a chicken biscuit sandwich. "I'd keep the food," she teases as she peels the wrapper back. She takes a bite, her cheeks puffed out as she listens. Her eyebrows climb up slowly. "Yurff sfftuck?"

"More or less." Slinger replies simply. "I may have gone too far down the security rabbithole here, but I didn't exactly think I'd stumble on the key to intra-nesting real and generated personalities on custom grown biostrata!" He gets a little excited there but that causes a painful shift in his blood-pressure.

He takes a bite of the hash brown and moans- half in pain and half in bliss from the stimuli provided by the greasy food.

Grimm coughs and nearly chokes on her oversized bite. She pats her chest with a closed fist. "You seriously can't----get back in your body?" she asks incredulously. "What're we going to do? We have to go get your body before someone steals it for science or something!"

"Its fine." Slinger says. "I've got 72 hours of juice in the tank before I have to worry about muscle deterioration. Its just been..." He looks around, spots the time on the screen across the room. "38.5 hours. So we're still good. After that... well I'm going to need to put myself on ice so my suit stays fresh. Otherwise it's in standby mode. You'd be the only person who /could/ see me. I'd have a hard time too if I didn't know where I parked the damned thing- well that and this new analog stand-in sensory package I plugged into this rig." He smirks and takes another bite.

"I'm hoping I can sort this out before then... if I get my 'feelings' hurt one more time I'm just going to delete myself... I swear. I excised half of the damned things before I even had the suit. I was down to just the good ones and regulated those hard with my t-lobe. This thing on the other hand..." He taps his head. "I don't even know. I'm going ot need to review the procedural data this spider-character was drawn up from when I'm in my original frame again. I mean... neighborhood teenage spider-hero? Why on Earth would that be the thing that sells best with the Upper East Side?" He shakes his head as he he chews lazily.

Grimm is trying not to panic, and she feels like warm death still, so it's hard to get fully freaked out. Daemon has done some crazy stuff before, so how is this much different? He'll think his way out of it somehow!

That's when something strikes her. "Your feelings got hurt? But your feelings never get hurt," Gabrielle comments, surprised just how different his temporary body is.

"I'll freak out if we hit the 72 hour mark. Then I'm going to need to run a parallel system and rebuild from scratch. With less than nothing this time around. I barely hacked myself a background for this- it came with an ID, and I barely did that because I was just going for a joyride to test it out." He replies, not answering the question. He's definitely avoiding something.

Grimm squints a bit at his evasiveness. "You've only been in that body for a little bit. How'd you possible get your feelings...hurt?" she asks and slows down as she tries to remember what happened amidst the drinking.

His bug eyes remain affixed to her for a long moment before he finally answers. "Its fine. We don't need to get into it again. As you can see..." He waves towards the equipment before throwing the wrapper towards an empty box serving as a trashcan. "I'm packing up and I'll be out before you know it. No more intrusions from me... 'Short and sweet to the soul' just like you said." He continues, as his body language shifts into something visibly sullen its clear he remembers a lot more than she does.

Slinger moves out of sight to sulk and dismantle something else so he can keep his composure.

"Just like I...?" Gabrielle starts. It takes her a moment before her hungover mind starts putting things together. Her face falters a bit in surprise. "Wait, that? That hurt your feelings?" she asks. Daemon would've laughed that off and known it was ribbing. The concept of Daemon and sulking doesn't even compute!

Slinger's head pokes up from behind the Sprotropic Initializer and looks at Grimm. "Really?" He asks uncertainly.

"Well... it was a very poignant song... and like I said- I'm having a hard time gauging these stupid things. If I didn't perfectly understand why they evolved I'd say they were useless!" He says a bit angrily, but he remains obscured- perhaps to stay out of sight just in case she's just trying to spare his feelings.

With a pained groan, Gabrielle wobbles up to her feet and descends the last few steps, walking towards Slinger's hiding place. "It was a good song in general. And I was drunk and a bit angry, yeah. I'm sorry. I'm an ***hole," she sighs heavily as she steps around the Sprotropic Initializer to look at him directly.

"You were the only person who could put up with my jerk self for a long time. Guess that isn't the case anymore," she says sullenly.

Her hand juts out to give him the rest of the bag. "The rest of the food's for you. You needed the high calories, remember?"

Slinger's turns and smirks. "You are an @$hole." He says in agreement. "And I still can. I was drunk too. That was this body's first drink. Maybe... GHB-wine isn't a good starting point back into alcoholism?" He laughs before he reaches out, looking as if it were for the bag at first, but he's still very fast.

He grabs her arm instead and pulls her close for a quick consolatory hug. That's probably weird but done without thought by August.

"I'm a total looser in this baby body. That's all- I can deal with it just fine." He says, trying to keep their dynamic as is despite the alterations he's gone through.

He snatches the food and says, "Oh no. I remember. But I'm broke- so I was ignoring that bit of advice. Thanks so much! I appreciate you."

He fights his way into the bag to eat anything and everything he can fit into his mouth.

Grimm gets tugged into a hug by surprise, not even resisting as she bumps against him. Weirder still, Gabrielle hugs back tightly. "I missed my best friend," she says quietly. She lets go once the food is snatched and forces a smirk to hide her feelings. "Guess you aren't my sugar daddy long legs anymore, though."

"Well- I missed you too." Slinger says, grateful to have all this resolved between them.

"Even when I get my body back- I'll be around. I promise." He says as consolation. "I'm sure I'll be back to paying for expensive trips for beachside drinks by week's end." He adds with his confidence restored as he unwraps one of the treats inside the bag.

He begins stuffing his face.

"Good, because I could definitely use a vacation get away from villains, mages, and monsters, please," Gabrielle chuckles, although she's totally serious about that part. "If you want, you can leave all this stuff here for now. We got your body to deal with, first."

Slinger makes another sigh of relief. "That would be amazing... because ... I don't think I really have any place for any of it until I can get back in..." He says, laughing because he was so caught up in his feelings he hadn't thought through what he was going to do next.

Not having a plan is so unlike Daemon. Gabrielle smirks faintly. "Well. Don't worry about it. I had the space," she says as a peace offering.

"So...once I'm over this hangover, we'll see what we can do with your real body. Okay?" she asks.

"That would be amazing." Slinger answers with a warm and genuine smile. There's nothing at all menacing or crafty in it. It's... almost... wholesome.

"But since I don't have to rush out... I think I'm going to spin up a hammock and sleep for a few hours. I've got a line of bruises running up my ribs I'd like to sleep away." He says in between menu items from the bag. Once his mouth is suitably full he webs the bag onto a peice of equipment so that the mouth is open and he can reach inside easily. Then he fiddles with his webslinger, ejecting a cartridge to put in a different one.