Crossing Off Your Bucket List

[Will Stanton]

Having obtained the drop of robo-blood from Ashlie, Will walked through the streets of London towards Conduit's hideout.

No, that's not quite right. Let's try that again.

Having obtained the drop of robo-blood from Ashlie, Will walked in the vague direction of Conduit's hideout. Conduit had not been so stupid as to let Will retain the memory of exactly where the hideout was. Instead, when she had programmed Will's responses to being asked what was going on and given him his marching orders, she had simply left a vague general location, centered around a Mutant Town park, where Will could go when he was good and ready. There were enough cameras in the area that Conduit was sure to notice Will marching through, and would be able to have him collected and, ahem, dealt with as she saw fit. And so the green-haired X-Man was headed right into her clutches.

No, that's not quite right. Let's try that again.

Having obtained the drop of robo-blood from Ashlie, the headless body of Will carefully made its way in the vague direction of Conduit's hideout. His head? Still a bucket with a drawn-on face, filled to the brim with water. Will was careful not to spill any as he walked through the streets, wandering in nigh-aimless circles around the centerpoint of the park. He may have been wandering around for quite some time, but Wills were a common enough site in mutant town that no one was going to say much -- that would involve trying to figure out what weird fucking thing he was doing now, and hey, that sounds like the entry point for an annoying time, doesn't it?

[Conduit]

Conduit's grip on the surveillance network isn't perfect. Somebody had noticed an intrusion and begun to try and purge it from the system. Granted, any mundane IT department would struggle with the electronic copy of a shapeshifter's mind rigged up by a technopath with more intuitive than technical understanding of electronics. So they could swing their hammer all they want, short of purging the entire system they weren't getting rid of her access. But it was still annoying having them cut her feed as she's actively surveilling the city like some kind of terrible streaming service. So she doesn't spend much time actively watching, instead having taken apart her laptop (setting aside the SDD containing a million copies of Will) and reconfiguring it into something more portable to fit around her arm. As well as ripping out the WiFi module to turn into a hairclip.

She really should have kept a part of Will to serve as a multi-tool as well as any custom parts she could possibly need. Not making that mistake again. She could use him to just turn into whatever gadget she needs but she's used to her tech working a certain way with her power and Will's hardware runs on it's own logic. No one likes switching operating systems, at least not for things she expects to be in constant contact with or perform intricate things like the nanites she send him to get. Even she's not reckless enough to inject herself with microscopic Wills. He's come back from his errant wandering in circles with a bucket for a head, for Tech's sake. Wait! She jumps up from the floor where her project is spread out and dashes out the door to retrieve her toy.

[Will Stanton]

Conduit's programming had made it so this Will's memory of their meeting -- and what he had to do -- was blocked until he delivered the robo-blood. She had written code to reshunt his awareness every time he tried to bring it up, but she hadn't excluded herself from the list of conditions -- the problem with working with a Will brain, rather than a nice and predictable piece of silicon.

As such, when Will spotted Conduit hurrying over to her, his bucket-eyes locked on to her for a moment, then glazed over. He stumbled, headed towards the ground, the bucket dropping and spilling the water out as he shrank and dwindled. A plastic doll -- check that, a headless plastic doll, with a plastic doll-sized bucket alongside -- sat in the puddle as one of Conduit's random triggers triggered. Easy enough to grab him, at any rate.

[Conduit]

For a moment Conduit panics, incorrectly assuming that the bucket is carrying, well, nanite-laced blood. When it spills out regular old water she's equal parts relieved and disappointed.

She picks the doll up in one hand and palms the bucket in the other, holding the former up to her face, tilting and moving it around to inspect it for any vials or compartments or anything that would indicate he'd been successful.

"Come on, where is it. Don't tell me you messed up this one simple task..."

[Will Stanton]

The doll action figure collectable had a compartment in the back that Conduit could pry open, revealing a small quantity of nanite-laced blood stored inside.

Probably easier than straining it out of clay, now that she thought about it.

[Conduit]

"That's all you got!?" she asks the bucket, holding up the puppet to look more closely at the blood. She can hear the nanites inside of it humming though it sounds muddled and muted compared to regular electronics. "What happened to these poor babies? They're all... gooped up inside and out. Poor Panopticon's work..."

She sniffles. Sure, she'd meant to get her hands on them purely as a tool to be used, but now that she sees the state they're in she's suddenly reminded that these are all that's left of her mentor. And any traces of her neural signature have long been overwritten. "You guys really suck, you know?" she tells the bucket before carefully pouring the blood out into her cupped hand. Directing the nanites is harder than she'd hoped but she at least manages to have them separate from the blood itself, letting it drip through her fingers until a tiny silver drop is left, smaller than the head of a pin. "Gosh, most of these don't even self-replicate anymore. This'll take forever to do anything useful with." she groans, throwing her head back.

[Will Stanton]

"T....they seemed to be serving their purpose," the bucket squeaked out, almost inaudibly due to the lack of water inside. "N....no complaints from A....Ashlie."

[Conduit]

"Duh. She's prolly the one who did this hackjob." she says as she's making the drop of nanites rise into a tiny spiral pillar. It holds that shape for a moment, then there's the faintest static crackle and the structure collapses, shedding a good third of it's mass in a fine dust of broken nano-machines and leaving behind a kind of fatty, oily residue. "What? What!? Come on! How are they breaking!? Structural failure? Missing synapse-components? Self-diagnostics, now!" she yells at the remaining droplet.

On the nano-scale, only some even respond to Conduits command while their siblings fall apart as bio-plastics and hydro-carbons cease blending with metal and alloys. The veins and striations of technology mixed with biology on a sub-atomic level that run through the nanite bodies fail and whole sections crumble. Meanwhile the nanites still retaining some functionality attempt to scavenge what they can to patch themselves. For every five maybe one manages to 'survive' and they all end up as patchworks with too many or too few legs, cobbled together sensors and wonky propulsion.

"Damnit! I need raw materials to feed these poor things..."

[Will Stanton]

While Conduit is busy messing around with her busted nanites, Will attempted to slide out of Conduit's hand, to make a break for it. After all, she was so entranced by her shitty busted nanites that she wouldn't notice an X-Man getting to a safe distance. Surely.

[Conduit]

And she doesn't. At least for long enough that Will and his bucket can make a break for it. Unfortunately short puppet legs don't get you very far very quickly and Conduit has little problem catching up to the fleeing toy. "Hey! Where do you think you're going?" she asks, jogging after Will and snatching him in one hand. "Turn into something with a computer chip." she demands, shaking the puppet as if rattling Will's head bucket would somehow accelerate the process.

[Will Stanton]

"Yeah, let me get right on that, no thanks," he said, turning into an ooze and trying to slip through Conduit's fingers.

[Conduit]

"Damnit! Hold up, I'm not done with you!" she says, clenching her fist which only makes Will squirt out between her fingers faster. Slapping the drop of nanites to her forehead to free up her other hand she starts trying keep catching the dripping ooze and sorts of try winding it around her hands like she's spooling up a cable. "You really want me working with the a-holes who wanna keep things shitty for mutants? Cause it'd be real easy to let them make me and turn that schmancy portal into one to the tentacle-blender dimension or sumthin'!"

[Will Stanton]

"...You're bluffing..." Will said, uncertainty, as Conduit coiled him up semi-effectively, the ooze wrapping around her hands and only slowly dripping down.

[Conduit]

"Yeah, you're right, they'd neeeever ask me to make this little project go catastrophically awry so they have an excuse to step in and drop a Sentinel on your heads." she says with a shit-eating grin. "They just love having a technocratic enclave resisting their jurisdiction. Wouldn't know anything about that kinda thing. 'Course you guys are too wishy-washy to stand your ground and start a war, or even reinforce your holdings, so I'm sure that'll go great!"

[Will Stanton]

"...If you even take a half-step towards hurting someone..." Will threatened, before the ooze solidified in her hands into a small smartphone.

[Conduit]

"A-bloo-bloo-bloo, next you'll tell me I'm not allowed to turn off billionaires' pace-makers. God forbid a girl have hobbies!" she laments even as her power washes over the phone, arresting it in it's shape but otherwise leaving Will's source-code alone. At least for the moment. "So! What kinda exotic materials can you turn into? Vibranium? Adamantium alloys? Surely you can do Cogmium."

[Will Stanton]

*Bloop* came the text message on the phone.

"I can do an excellent imitation of aluminium foil, and I've been told my ABS plastic is award-worthy."

[Conduit]

Conduit makes an extended fart sound with her mouth and the phone is spammed with floating thumbs-down emojis.

"Can you at least extrude regular metal? Lil' Nanites gotta eat to get big and strong. Wait, no. Be fruitful and multiply."

[Will Stanton]

"You want me to breast-feed your nanite-babies?" the phone asked. "Not worried about imprinting, are we?"

[Conduit]

"Why you gotta make it sound so gross. And damnit, they would still be made out of you. Fine! We're going shopping at the junkyard." she decides and turns a direction after pinging the GPS through the WillPhone. "I'm not walking that far. Go-Go Gadget Electro-Scooter!" she announces and underhand-tosses Will into the air.

[Will Stanton]

Will bounced off the ground, clattering for a moment, as if debating whether or not to listen. But, after a moment, the phone bucked and shifted, elongating and stretching into a hot pink scooter with little frilly green ribbons on the tassels. Not exactly something Conduit would be inconspicuous on, but it looked to be functional enough.

[Conduit]

"You're the worst." she informs him as she rips off the tassels and chucks them into the gutter before climbing onto the scooter. "The color's nice though. Needs more highlights, like some lightning bolts or flames." And with that she putters off towards the (not so) nearest junkyard.

[Will Stanton]

The scooter, notably, did not immediately shift into lightning bolts or flames, the mopey moped not bending to every random whim Conduit had. The nerve!

It did, however glide through the city streets well, handling corners like a dream and not eating through charge as quickly as one might expect. That might just be professional pride on the part of a serious shifter, or maybe it was trying to pacify a supervillain who had threatened to murder a whole buncha people. Who can say?

[Conduit]

Conduit spends some time zooming around and taking a couple extra roads than strictly necessary. The entire way they have nothing but green lights and at least two cars and a truck of a certain kind of make suspiciously burst into flames in their wake but that could well be sheer coincidence. When they reach the fenced-off area in a less densely populated part of the greater London area she comes to a screeching stand-still with a side-slide.

"Hmm. No cameras except at the gate. You figure they got dogs? It's a junkyard, right, so they gotta have rabid mutts." she decides as she hops off the scooter. Holding out her hand with her palm up she adds, "Big ole dinosaur bone please!" the 'please' somehow only making her sound more demanding.

[Will Stanton]

Now, if Will wanted to be unhelpful, he'd just refuse to do it. I mean, that's the easiest path of resistance, right?

But a) there was always the chance that Conduit might be sociopathic once more, b) 'helping' is in his nature, c) you can't get mad at someone for following Genie rules, it's in the contract and d) bones notably do not have computer chips.

And that was how, instead of a state-of-the-art electric scooter, Conduit found herself staring at a two-meter long dinosaur femur. Best of luck with that.

[Conduit]

"Oh come onnnn." she groans and barely manages to lift one side of the bone before letting it thonk back to the ground. "Smaller than that, you sput!"

[Will Stanton]

This could have gone on for quite some time, with Will first turning into an absolutely tiny bone and back and forth, but through a combination of needling and threatening, Conduit would, in fact, get Will into the cartoon-sized bone of her dreams, complete with un-realistic shape and weight for an actual bone. Absolutely delectable, if a cartoon dog happened to be lying around.

[Conduit]

With insurance in the form of a bone tucked into her belt Conduit marches up to the fence, an easily surmountable barrier for the technocratic child of an insane gen---aaand she's cutting a hole with some simple wire-cutters. Important to know the classics and not over-engineer everything and definitely not because that's what she had access to. With the way clear she makes her way through the stacks of junk. She briefly stops by the occasional newer car to rummage through and pull out electronics and nests of wire, lugging her finds along until she comes across a bent and rusted shopping cart.

This continues for a bit as she makes her way to a big container with a dirty, laminated piece of paper reading 'Electronics - No Monitors!'. Despite or perhaps to spite the sign there are a couple monitors carelessly left right outside the container. This is where Conduit's expectations are proven correct as well and the tell-tale sound of a dog barking heralds the arrival of some kind of pitbull/german shepard mix. "You're up!" Conduit informs Will as she pulls him free and chucks him in the vague direction of the dog while she clambers up and into the container full of discarded technology.

The dog is decently trained but, well, a perfect bone is a perfect bone! It catches Will mid-air, turning it's barks into subdued growling that continues as it chews on the sturdy treat. It has the intruder corned in the container smelling of burned lightning and plastics anyway so it'll just keep watch while gnawing away. If the brief noise alerted anybody, they don't follow up on it, possibly because the cameras watching the more valuable trash conveniently show the dog chasing off a particularly brave pigeon and not the young teenager rummaging through old computers and GPS units.

She spends a solid two hours in there, occasionally climbing out to tip-toe to her shopping cart to deposit or retrieve something, keeping her distance from the growling dog. When she's finally done she's got her finished hairclip fastened in place, though the plastic casing is a bit singed here and there where she had to melt it to bend it into the right shape. Similarly her left arm is sporting a bracer that looks less like a sleek arm-unit and more like a clunky Fallout prop. Going along with that is some kind of contraption strapped to her back that, at the push of a button, unfolds into two over-sized metal arms that clamp around her own in what could very generously be called a fifth of a mech-suit. One of her eyes is red from irritation and just a little bit of blood has dried on her lower lid, making her blink it in irritation, flashing a hint of metallic gleam moving behind her iris.

"Much better!" she announces. "Hey, you wanna keep helping me not commit atrocities or are you good where you are?" she laughs in the direction of the dog.

[Will Stanton]

At the moment, appeasement was probably the best strategy. You can't stop Conduit from doing....whatever it is she was up to if you don't know what she's up to, and there was the lingering issue of the fact that she was being forced to comply with someone, someone with even worse ideas up their sleeve. Don't catch the small fish, use them to get to the big fish. Conduit didn't want help? Well, she was going to get some anyway, like it or not.

Still, even a restrained Conduit was a threat, so slowing her down in the guise of helping her was probably the best plan at the moment. Continue to let her think she had the upper hand and was in control of the situation, just...drag it out, make it a little tougher here and there. Prevent some chaos along the way. That was the plan.

Of course, this plan may not have been the best-thought-through, but YOU come up with a better one when you're a knobby bit of beef shank. Will was clutched between the dog's front paws, a rhythmic crunching sound coming as molars ground against the hard surface as the beast tried to gnaw off the last flecks of meat. Two hours of having the dog going to town had left Will slick with saliva, scratched notched and softened where the teeth had worked him over again and again.

At Conduit's call, the bone shuddered and twitched, causing the junkyard dog to cock it's head in confusion. And then it stretched unnaturally, warming and unfurling with a crack as bone splintered and shuddered. Limbs sprung from splintered ends, paws from marrow, a spine from the center core. Dark green fur spread across the surface like wildfire as Will rose to a new height --a larger dog, with eyes glowing a faint red. He growled -- a low, ancient rumble, deep in the throat, full of gravel and threat. That was more than enough for the smaller dog to yelp, pinning it's ears back, and scrambling backward across the floor with it's tail tucked between it's legs. Will took one step forward, baring his teeth, and barked once, sharp and thunderous. That was more than enough for the junkyard mutt to skitter around the corner of some scrapped cars and disappear -- and possibly alert anyone in the area that something was going on.

[Conduit]

Conduit raises her augmented arms at her sides, palms up in the inter-dimensional gesture for 'What the hell, man?'.

"What the hell, man? We're on. A. Stealth. Mission. Whatever, can you get big enough for me to ride you?"

[Will Stanton]

Will growled -- was that a smirk? Dog facial expressions were tough to read. But Will was, in fact, growing bigger, as he stepped forward. Muscles stretching, legs expanding, mass, uh, enmassening, until Willard the Big Green Dog was looming over her.

[Conduit]

"Oh yeah, no one's gonna notice this." she complains as she clambers up onto Will's back by grabbing mechanical-fistfuls of fur.

[Will Stanton]

"Unless you can shrink yourself, 'big enough to ride' has a few size requirements," Will growled, as Conduit hoisted herself onto his back.

[Conduit]

"I mean I prolly could if those nanites hadn't gotten chewed up by a deluded AI." she huffs. "Go. To the stupid apartment so I can wrap up my stupid business with the stupid government morons."

[Will Stanton]

"And what business would that be?" Will said, beginning to lope along. Slowly. In the vague general direction of Conduit's apartment, rather than a straight beeline.

[Conduit]

"I will politely inform them where they can shove their antidote. Everything else is on them!"

[Will Stanton]

"And you think they will just let you go?"

[Conduit]

"Probably not. But I think it's only fair I give them the chance to walk away." she says magnanimously.

[Will Stanton]

"Is this another one of those plans that ends up with a body count? Because you know how I feel about those."

[Conduit]

"Hey they started it! And it's only, like three guys. Who really really suck! They poisoned an inno--a poor little girl!"