Pulse

…..

I am very much aware that I shouldn't be starting a fic series right now as my real life is chock-a-block with stuff, but this idea just wouldn't leave me alone. As a result, updates may be sporadic.

So, in this universe, Rapunzel and Merida are the voice banks for an AI performer, swapping back and forth on different vocal styles. Hiccup is the AI's tech supervisor and Jack works the electronic orchestra. There is mild tension, and then things get weeeeeird…

…..

There was no question of who would arrive at the stadium first; it was always Hiccup, wheeling his gigantic hard drive in a granny cart past the throngs of people already queuing, though they wouldn't even be letting people into the building for another three hours. Harmony had already been uploaded the night before and prepping the stage and the control room for the concert would only take 40 minutes at most, but Hiccup was a careful chap, one might even say fatalistic. Something was bound to go wrong, he always thought, so getting a head start with the setup would at least give him the edge to solve any problems that did arise.

The bouncers barely glanced at him as he flashed his badge and shuffled into the building, a scrawny, shaggy-headed youth whose age could not be determined by looking at him; he could have been anywhere from fourteen to thirty. His clothes were clean but unremarkable, the prototypical t-shirt with some logo for something on it under an unbuttoned plaid shirt, jeans that were decidedly unskinny and baggy enough to conceal both of his feet, a sheepish, slightly nervous expression. He made it all the way to the projection room door before anyone even thought to ask him for ID.

Once inside, he booted up his laptop and plugged his hard drive into it, and searched the tubes for Harmony. Toothless popped up first, floating around the screen and pulling out webpages without being prompted.

"Not now, bud," Hiccup admonished. "Big concert in four hours."

Toothless nodded eagerly, threw the webpages away with a flourish and brought out the holograph software, flipping through the palettes until he found Hiccup's most commonly used tools. He could be trusted with this; for all that this AI had his own mind and personality he complimented Hiccups' so well he could almost be trusted to run the concert's effects by himself. Almost.

Harmony made her entrance on the laptop, and spread herself over the rest of the screens in the room until she reached the projector and attempted to switch it on. She always seemed eager to burst out of the computer. Toothless snorted at her from the corner of Hiccup's laptop, and Hiccup gave him a tap with the cursor. Harmony was a performer after all, she couldn't help wanting to break onto the stage.

"You don't have too long to wait," Hiccup told her. "We'll just do some costume changes first, okay?"

Harmony looked down imperiously at him. Hiccup was no stranger to that look from girls, but from an AI it was still pretty weird. Nevertheless, he chose a set of brushes and started painting bright rainbow streaks on the underside of her arching pigtails.

…..

Rapunzel arrived two hours before showtime, clutching an iced lemonade in both hands and nervously scanning the projection room. Even now, eight months after she'd been recruited to provide Harmony's vocals, she seemed overwhelmed by all that entailed. Hiccup waved a greeting, as did Toothless from his corner of the laptop screen.

"Hey Punz, what do you think? Too much?" Hiccup asked her, gesturing at Harmony. He could have guessed her answer.

"Um…" she mumbled, squeezing her lemonade gently. "A little bit. It's lovely and all, but it's a bit…."

Harmony's jellyfish gown, crafted for her torch songs, was pale blue with speckles of luminescent purple and pink darting about the full bubble skirt, pulsing in and out to the beat of the backing track. The tentacles wrapped around her shoulders and neck to form a high collar and her hair was pulled up into a gravity-defying triple bun. She'd opened the projector into the room and was standing proudly with one hand on her hip, smiling serenely and gazing out at Rapunzel under her blue-tinted eyelashes.

Rapunzel's own outfit was considerably less spectacular. A pale pink twinset with a blue floral print skirt, ballet flats and a single barrette trying and failing to keep one side of her hair off of her face. It had the uncanny effect of making her look like a schoolgirl and a soccer mom at the same time.

"Wouldn't it be better to leave her hair loose? I mean, she's meant to be underwater for those songs, so it'd be sort of mermaid-style, right?" she suggested with an eager but awkward smile. Before meeting Rapunzel, Hiccup had never thought anyone could be more stressed out by interacting with the outside world than he was.

But that was uncharitable, so he stomped on those thoughts. Rapunzel had been raised in some sort of fundamentalist church society and she'd broken away from them less than a year before, and just a month longer than she'd been a part of Harmonica LTD. You could still see it in the way she dressed, in her three feet of hair that had rarely been cut, in her constant need to apologize for even having an opinion on something.

"You might be on to something," Hiccup said, and the way she beamed made it worth the dirty look Harmony shot him.

He took down the buns and let her hair flow freely. It was a little blank against the spectacular dress, so he added long strings of glowing pearls and seaweed ribbons, and left the colour at a turquoise ombre running to deep marine blue.

"Perfect," Rapunzel sighed, then she curled up in the corner to start her vocal warmups.

…..

Jack sauntered through the door an hour before showtime, ruffled Hiccup's hair obnoxiously and flopped down in the corner to shoot the breeze with Rapunzel, casually ignoring all the prep work he was supposed to be doing.

"Uh, Jack?" Hiccup began.

"Relax, pancake, we've got plenty of time. 'Sides, T-Rex isn't here yet."

Rapunzel giggled and Hiccup rolled his eyes. The nicknames were a mystery, they seemed to come out of nowhere and have no relation to anything they had ever said or done. Hiccup suspected, with his degree in armchair psychology, that they were all part of this ploy Jack had going on to make him seem witty and quirky and interesting because he felt he was none of those things in reality.

His clothes straddled the line between trying too hard and not trying at all. Skinny jeans of course, like any good hipster. Quirky hat, this one a pale blue beanie with a silver snowflake worn in the middle of July for ultimate quirk points. Oversized hoodie with a beer company logo despite the fact that Jack wouldn't legally be allowed to drink for two more years.

Rapunzel thought that Jack was the most amazing man she'd ever met. He was just like all of those effortlessly cool guys she'd only seen on television before. The fact that Jack clearly put a lot of effort into crafting his personality was lost on her, who had only known boys brought up in the same sheltered way she had been.

Jack barely glanced at Harmony, and she stonily ignored him in turn. As far as Jack was concerned, the real art was in the music he produced and Harmony herself was just a conduit to filter it through to the masses. He plugged in his keyboard and virtual string system and warmed up for a matter of minutes, then took a short nap under the table.

…..

Merida blustered in just a half hour before showtime, just as Rapunzel was being fitted with the OVP device. Unlike the other three, who at least somewhat planned their lives to fit around their concert schedule, Merida seemed to think the concerts were just a thing that she had to stop by on her way to something more interesting. She was dressed as though she'd just rolled out of bed and run to the stadium in whatever clothes she had handy, in this case denim shorts over blue sparkly tights and a t-shirt so big it was hanging off one shoulder. The t-shirt had a dinosaur on it, probably a non-verbal challenge to Jack regarding the nickname. It was hard to tell if she'd brushed her hair or just left it like that, it seemed to look the same no matter what.

"Cutting it a bit fine, dontcha think?" Jack needled at her. It was fine for Hiccup to say that, as the designated responsible one of the group, but Jack was doing it to be obnoxious. Hiccup was almost annoyed on her behalf.

"Had an eye appointment," she responded, gulping down the last of Rapunzel's lemonade.

That shut him up. Jack could needle anyone about just about anything, but the subject of Hiccup's prosthetic, Rapunzel's parents or Merida's eyepatch were off-limits and he knew it. Even if today's eyepatch was ripe for parody, covered as it was with crudely drawn stick ninjas most likely done by one or all of Merida's three younger brothers.

She scratched at it irritably as she went through her warm-ups, standing uncomfortably close to Hiccup as she did so, as she always did. To be fair, Merida always seemed to stand too close to him even when she was on the other side of the room. Her very presence seemed to suck the air out of him. To distract himself, he fussed with the vectors on Harmony's chainlink evening gown for her hair metal songs.

"That doesn't look to comfortable," Merida commented, suddenly leaning over his shoulder. He gulped.

"Well, it's not for real life obviously," Hiccup retorted. "But it'll look good on stage."

She grunted non-commitally, and wandered off again to chatter with Rapunzel. Hiccup exhaled sharply, and was annoyed to find Jack grinning at him from under the table with one eyebrow raised.

…..

The curtain rose over the stage and the lights burst over the audience, drenching the entire room with a blanket of deep space and shimmering starlight. Harmony floated into being, an alien princess in a gown of glowing lunar dust, perched on one foot on a planet. When she opened her mouth, a shower of meteors issued forth.

In the projection room, strapped firmly into the OVP device, Rapunzel began to sing.

…..