markofthewise | Sokka the 74th

[THE FIRST DAY.]

[Two weeks. It's a long time to be on a mission, but Sokka has no regrets. The mess with Kin'cora had gotten to him and he found a kind of relief in working with other people from other enclosures. There was a lot of talk among him and the others. He spread the word. Maybe it wouldn't do Luceti much good, given he learned very little, but the more the others knew, the better. But boy was he glad to be back in Luceti. When he emerges from the tunnels at around 6PM, he's tired out from a hard day of work, but it's a good kind of tired. He makes going home his first priority. He'll miss dinner, inevitably, but with any luck there's leftovers. Catching up with the others takes a few hours before he ever breaks away to wander the village.

What's on the agenda? Hitting up the smithy to see where things are at. He never got to find out how much was lost after the Kin'corans left, so it's time to see if one of his ~~minions~~ smithy buddies took an inventory. And you know, he wants to check in on them too. That's cool. Also, he heads to Good Spirits because he was informed very sternly by one of his buddies on the mission that the only proper way to end a hard day's work is a good stiff drink. Sokka, the adult that he is, was inclined to agree. THAT IS HIS ENTIRE DAY.

But there is another.]

[DAWN OF THE NEXT DAY]

[Sokka wakes up and does his usual morning routine and goes to NOT the smithy, but the BATTLE DOME. That's right. Record scratch. After talking to the main console for awhile, he heads into one of the rooms and in something that takes some finagling at first, he starts... building a sub. A holographic sub. One that is small enough to fit into his hand, but can expand if he gives the command, so he can work on specific details. It's like working on a blueprint, but in 3D. His nights on his mission had been spent trying to recreate the submarine made by the Mechanist. He's been steadily improving on the design, specifically built to be powered by waterbending, but done in a way to streamline the process and make it faster. And sturdier. He's not sure it will be easy to build with Luceti's technology, but...

Well, Haruhi got him excited. And he spends the better half of the day on this. Because of the Dome time limit, he's constantly seen going in and out to restart the program or grab a snack. For those hoping to fight, this is probably annoying, since there's only six chambers that tend to get used a lot. At one point during the day, he loses the dome to some short and grumpy guy, so Sokka turns to the journal.]

Has anyone really tried the stuff in these vending machines before? I mean, I usually just get a soda or something, but this stuff is amazing. Like... look at these. [He lifts up an oreo to the camera.] It's two cookies, but with some kind of paste between them. But the paste tastes like sugar! And then there's these! [Sokka lifts up an red lump of candy.] Apple gels. They're great, although I don't think they taste like real apples. There's something unusually refreshing about them. I had about ten just now and it made my fingers all tingly. Actually, I'm kind of feeling tingly all over and-- [Sokka looks away and spots something else] Oh! And check this out! [He pulls out a WORM. A multicolored worm.] It's a CANDY worm. I was thinking I could use it for fishing, but it's actually kind of tasty. Oh, and then there's these fished shape crackers...

[He'll go on like this for awhile. People can listen or ignore him, but he'll be casually highlighting the awesome contents of the Battle Dome vending machines.

He'll be coming home later with the stomach ache from hell.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Huh."

Give her a moment while she further considers this point. "Can you sharpen'em up? Or does that ruin the 'ranging?"

"Sure you can, but you need to wear protective gloves so you don't hurt yourself. But mine is sharp enough to cut through rope easily."

It was absurdly sharp, really. He could kill someone with it.

"So, if I had one made out of wood...I could probably use it for long-range dusting?"

"... well, potentially, I guess? I think I could hit a target like that if I had to."

"Not to toot my own horn but...I've kinda been known not to miss the heart at even freaky distances. But if there was a miss? A returning weapon might not be such a terrible thing..."

"Well that's the good part. Me? I could hit the vampire in the heart while on the return."

"...I'm impressed. That? That is something I would like to see."

"Impressive. But also pointless. There's not a lot of vampires to practice that on. But wings on a cultist? You should see the moves me and Katara do. We've got a thing. It's a really cool thing. Pun intentional. Because... well, she freezes. And I slice. Or, shatter, really."

That did sound rather cool. As did the simple implication of one boomerang against a Cultist. More importantly? Against the General. Nip in, clip the wing, don't even have to get near him...

Don't even have to have his blood anywhere close to her.

"You have to teach me."

Edited 2012-09-30 02:18 (UTC)

It was really the same tactic used for hunting. He didn't expect Buffy to be so impressed though.

"... on the drafts, I get explosive ones. A whole bunch of them."

"Not sure how I feel about explosives, but... the notion isn't exactly revolting? And I crossbows aren't at convenient as I might've hoped, here."

"I never got the hang of crossbows. I guess because I went from a world that went straight from bows and ballistas straight to here with guns."

Crossbows seemed like a rather pointless middle ground.

"Bows are funky and all but they don't come pre-loaded. Bolts, though? Always good for a quick slay at a distance.

Guns just never help. Not until they manage to perfect wooden bullets."

"You know, Buffy, you're a vampire slayer and all... but your vampire slayer rules don't really apply here. Guns seem to help a lot in the drafts. And we only ever really fight cultists, so... I mean, we only have the one evil vampire here, right?"

Sokka was addressing an important issue. Buffy was too sentimental over fighting vampires. And it was bring her and everyone else down.

"Have you ever been shot, Sokka?"

"No. Is it anything like being bitten by a Shift Hunter?"

"While being tasted by unholy hell beasts is miserable and inconvenient, at least you have a chance to fight them off. Any old schmuck can just waltz into your backyard and pull his trigger at your heart.

It's fast. It's fatal. It's freaking horrifying. Even I can't just....heal from that."

And perhaps the Slayer's disdain for guns was rooted not just in sentimentality but in an actual and cogent fear of the things.

A chance to fight them off.

He thought about blood bending. Those new Dream Shifters. Any experiment ever. And so many other things he'd discovered in Luceti...

"I don't use guns either. But that's because the cultists don't either. If they did..."

If they were fighting armed enemies with that kind of firepower, any sense of what was fair would be out the window. There was no honor in a gunfight.

Edited 2012-10-01 14:17 (UTC)

"Many of us would be dead. Several times over. And then this war would look a whole lot more like the real thing."

She didn't mean that a war needed guns to be real; on the contrary, she was merely commenting on how few their casualties were.

"It looked pretty real last time."

Just because few people in Luceti died, it didn't mean no one died. He saw plenty of corpses of Malnosso civilians, soldiers, and draftees from other enclosures. Not just cultists.

"Serious? Absolutely. A tragedy? Unquestionably.

But it feels like Hollywood in comparison to the history lessons back home. And I don't like feeling like I'm living in a fiction."

Billy already freaked her out enough on that count.

"Well... I'm not sure how I'd describe it compared to history back home. We never fought anything in space."

But it felt a lot closer to the two full scale battles he had participated in back home than the previous battles.

"Ditto, actually. On the space front. I think it's about ten times more likely that giant space lasers will be used to burn up bits of the Earth than for any of us to go up there and actually fight in zero gravity.

...What a depressing thought."

More like intriguing. "I wonder if the Malnosso have space lasers."

If so, why not use them on the cultists?

"Let the record state that I truly hope they do not. I never liked the movie Independence Day and -- even if I did? We don't have a Will Smith."

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