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[doihavetoexplainmath]

[There's no greeting or anything, just some changing and scraping sounds and a shot of a shadowy, faintly purple ceiling, and it cuts off four seconds later.]

Comments

[worthallthis]

Again with the so-alien-it's-not-scary thing. It's actually kind of cute in a weird way, the tentacles of hair starfished out from her head with tools in their coils (he never did find the signature HYDRA octopus all that scary). The bows and plastic bobbling eyes are baffling, but also make tools that might have been used to hurt him in the past somehow less potentially threatening. It's hard to be afraid of something with pretty ribbons, and plastic eyeballs that wobble when you move them. Christ, why do her tools have eyes?

But he does step forward to pluck a handful out of her hair's grip. "Thank you." Then, because it's just so weird and cute, he has to ask, "Why the eyes?"

[doihavetoexplainmath]

Her hair twists into hands where he meets it. "The first time I did it I was testing how well a recon bot series could recognize people, and there were lots of other things in the testing setup. But after that I just thought it was cute."

[worthallthis]

"It is," he has to agree, and then snaps his mouth shut, because that's an opinion and even if it's in agreement with hers, he really shouldn't be offering those. He scoots to the furthest corner of her room-slash-lab from anything sparking and flips open a couple of the plates on his forearm to start poking at the innards.

Because he imagines he shouldn't take her tools away, and anyway, the company isn't... totally unobjectionable. He tells himself he's used to being surrounded by techs and handlers and the privacy of his room is just unfamiliar. And she is a very cute kid, for a potential technician.

[doihavetoexplainmath]

Entrapta's only response, once she notices, is to push herself and her rolly chair off the wall and spin over his way to offer him a little lamp. She enjoys her strange, flickering, foggy nightmare palace of pastel purple, but you do need to be careful with lighting in here.

[worthallthis]

He glances up at her movement, tracks her as she approaches, then nods in thanks. He's worked in worse lighting before, he's sure of it, but his eyesight... apparently isn't quite what it was. Weird. Also, a lot of the bits inside the arm are small and fiddly, and that helps.

"Thank you. Please set it here?" Then, once he's back to working-- it's actually coming pretty easily, the bits to turn and tighten and tune up, like maybe he's had to do this before-- he asks, "How did you get all this stuff in here?"

[doihavetoexplainmath]

She complies--good light is important! "Oh, this is all from home. I'm missing a lot of things, tools that fall under the admiral's definition of dangerous, I guess, but most of it came along with me." She pats a random counter covered in robot parts. "You can get lucky with cabins."

[worthallthis]

"Oh." He looks around again, thinking of his stark nothing cabin. More like a concrete jail cell with metal furnishings than any kind of cabin, to be honest. He had nothing that constituted "home" that wouldn't send him into a panic attack, so he got a mish-mash of holding cells he's been in over the years with the addition of actual furniture.

"I must not have been lucky," he mutters, mostly to himself.

sorry about the double comment, my dog managed to literally jump on the keyboard

[doihavetoexplainmath]

"If I didn't have this I'd have to go through wardens," Entrapta agrees. There's no possibility she would simply not experiment with robotics engineering. She could just as soon stop breathing. But it'd be much more annoying if she had to explain everything she wanted to someone who'd want to tell her about how much making friends would improve her outcomes.

what a talented dog you have

[worthallthis]

Not that he would have wanted robotics equipment in his cabin, frankly, but maybe... something other than the concrete and metal he does have would be nice. She has made an interesting statement, though, which makes him frown as he gets back to work. "The wardens get you things?"

That doesn't seem right. Why would they get inmates things? That's not their job. Is it? (What even is their job? Jesus, he still doesn't know.)