milliways_bar | (no subject)

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The time spent in protective custody on the UNSC heavy cruiser Spark In Darkness is much easier to bear now that Vergil's worked out how best to coax a doorway in the engineering section to open onto Milliways. The Huragok hasn't been particularly noteworthy for a while, mostly because it's been puttering around in the garage, but today it's out and about in the Bar proper. From the look of things, it's taken a heap of parts from the oldest, rustiest, least used machines parked underneath the Bar and is currently assembling, testing, disassembling, and reassembling any number of mechanical designs in the space of a few seconds each.

It would hum contentedly, if the Forerunners had gifted Huragok with voices.

[tinytag: Amascut]

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There was some hubbub to do with a car recently and she was curious to find how these horseless carriages worked. She had followed the tracks made by the newest arrived vehicle to the garage and was hoping to snoop about, but found something else already there.

With the recent conversations with Alyx and Gordon, details about the void pests were still fresh in her mind. That is why she is eying the huragok and what it is doing with suspicion. It looks a lot like the pest species designated as 'spinner.' Moreover, it is engaging in an activity of the reminiscent of the duties spinner pests to the swarm. The sole purpose of a spinners, it seemed, was the maintenance and repair of the interdimensional portal to which it was assigned. Once the portal was destroyed beyond repair, the spinners assigned to it would explode and poison everything near them.

This may be a spinner opening a portal to whichever realm the void pests come from, but so far nothing of that nature seems to be happening.

Huragok generally fall into a difficult-to-disturb reverie while they work on their machines, but Vergil is just tinkering. The Huragok glances up in between picking up one part and the next and offers a mild twitter to the person observing its work. Nothing outstanding going on here, right?

Since she has been spotted, there is no reason to hang back.

She approaches and asks, "What are you making?" There is a chance this spinner-like creature won't understand or that she won't understand the response if it does, but there is no harm in trying.

Well, it may explode in response. Eh…

It tilts its head, six black eyes blinking in rapid succession. It looks back to its work, which is about half-disassembled at this point; then it looks back to the woman. Clearly, if it were making something specific, it would have made it by now.

On the other hand she doesn't seem to realize this, so it takes a few moments to assemble something not unlike a six-legged dog of sorts from the parts and lets it take a step forward before powering it off and disassembling it. Huragok build, unbuild, and rebuild at speeds other species find all but unthinkable, after all.

"Are you playing?"

The are reports of people with spinner familiars (it's a quite remarkable and headache inducing fact that such a thing is even possible) with childish personalities, but the actual void spinners that come in during pest invasions are nothing but business.

More like doodling. But yes, that should do; the creature makes a

^__^

happy-face and lets out a cheerful whistle. That is more or less what is going on.

"Well just as long as it's not a portal to wherever it is you are from. I don't think the rest of your swarm will appreciate the rules here and the patrons certainly won't appreciate this place being terraformed." She pauses to think. "But then, how did you get here? It must of been the front door, or else you would be guarding your portal and holding it open. Was it the front door?"

She is still convinced Vergil is a void spinner.

Oh, dear. It's going to be one of those conversations. With a sigh that heaves most of its body sacs at once, the Huragok puts its machine parts aside and reaches for a small red and silver device. Yes, it's got a speech synthesizer around here somewhere, but audio communication is a secondary format at best for its people. It much prefers visual. Hence the need to keep an Etch-a-Sketch at hand.

It shakes the device up and begins manipulating both knobs, only stopping when it's drawn a reasonable facsimile of the engineering area (including several humans, albeit blocky angular ones) and its door. It taps one tentacle against the door on the Etch-a-Sketch, then indicates the front door of the Bar. That's how it got here. Simple, right?

The sigh reminds her more of a splatter getting ready to explode than a spinner doing its usual thing and she dives behind a car. Jeez, what is with these things and exploding?

It doesn't explode, so she peeks her head out from behind the car. When she sees that it was pointing at a drawing in a nice red frame, she comes in for a closer look.

"Oh," she giggles nervously. "I was righ… wait, the other side of your door is a room with humans in it?" It doesn't look like a prison or containment cell of any kind.

"Prrrt!" the creature answers, or something like that. It shakes the Etch-a-Sketch again to wipe it clean and produces a marginally better image of a human- specifically, this one (http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100401102728/halo/images/thumb/5/58/CptVDare.png/335px-CptVDare.png), if one is inclined to be charitable. It also adds an approximation first of the United Nations Space Command naval emblem and then of the Office of Naval Intelligence logo alongside the human. The ONI human is, after all, the reason that Vergil is on board a human ship and not in Covenant space or dead.

The logos mean nothing except maybe I am trying to prove I am not an enemy but the armor and the bracer look familiar. "Ah, your world is much more technologically advanced than mine. I came here to look at these cars. I have no idea how they work."

Oh, well, if that's all that the situation is, the Huragok can help with that! Look, right here, there's a nice simple older model of- hm, it's a black and white 1980 Dodge sedan, made before catalytic converters; this should be simple enough to work with, right?

(Somewhere, Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues just got the bahoogies and don't know why.)

The creature floats over to the vehicle's hood, whistles briefly, and then opens the latch. For something as squishy as a Huragok it's got pretty good tentacle strength.

She walks over, then pulls up a stool, and starts looking on with interest.

If the car belongs to anyone here, she won't tell.

Vergil is not the greatest communicator in the world, but it is quite capable of taking things apart and pointing to the important bits, and occasionally holding up smudges of this or that substance for visual and scent identification. It finds the technology of the internal combustion engine to be absolutely adorable in its antiquity, and so it will go through the process of disassembly with a certain odd fondness.

Well, it won't explain everything but it is better that nothing. It will be mostly a mysterious collection of parts until a demonstration of the combustion is performed, but that might be a tad dangerous.

Still, better than nothing, and the disassembly and reassembly of the engine is interesting to watch.

What she is getting is that there are various fluids that flow through various tubes and cavities in various metal pieces. The most important part seems to be a cavity in which a large hammer like thing fits in with movable stoppers covering two entrances on the other end of the cavity.

Vergil would demonstrate the more important of the liquids, but there is the slight problem of Huragok body sacs and many tissues being extremely flammable. The creature is not about to set itself on fire for someone else's edification. It can, however, demonstrate the turning of the crankshaft in response to those movable stoppers, for whatever that's worth.

She wouldn't want him to explode either. It wouldn't be lethal (for her anyway) but it sure would hurt. And cause property damage. And cause a bunch of people to start pointing fingers and ask why she killed a patron.

:(

Hammer moves down and one stopper opens. She can hear an intake of air. Then the stopper closes without the other opening and the hammer thing moves back up. Okay, so it isn't a pump. The stoppers still don't open when the hammer moves back down, but stopper which hasn't moved so far finally opens when the hammer start its upward stroke again and she can hear air being expelled. Then the cycle begins again.

"It is sort of like a pump like a fish heart, but…" she furrows her brow, "it draws something in, squeezes and decompresses it, then squeezes it out. It isn't a pump. Something happens when whatever gets pulled in gets squeezed the first time, doesn't it?"

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