TITLE: Alphabet Soup: B is for Boom
AUTHOR: Marisa 'Mayonnaise' Jane G.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own the franchise, nor the characters of RPM. I just borrowed them for a while... I promise to follow contact protocol.
SPOILERS: Up to and Including: "Three's a Crowd"
ARCHIVE: Contact me please.
B is for Boom: Gem and Gemma are an explosive force...
K grimaced as the balloons ruptured; anticipating the effects of the unknown gas contained within, and redoubled her efforts to identify it. Gem and Gemma had always been a little bit reckless, but it was becoming clear that their time in the wasteland had nurtured that side of them. It reminded her rather of the very first few weeks they'd worked with her, bubbling over with energy, over enthusiastic, and getting their hands into everything she'd created without regard for its safety or their own. She'd almost immediately resented their presence, and likely wouldn't have even given them a chance, if they hadn't begged her to.
"Frankly, I'm not sure you two are qualified to be operating this equipment. It's delicate, dangerous, and very complex," K sighed, taking back the prototype blasting weapon Gem had immediately gravitated towards, and picked up backwards, as his sister followed in rapt attention.
"But we've been studying to do this for-" Gemma started.
"Five years now! If you don't-"
"At least let us try, they're going to-"
"Release us!" Gem whispered, as if he were speaking of the bogeyman.
"Let me get this straight. You WANT to be here? You're afraid of going home?"
"Release isn't going home... it's..." Gemma trailed off, and shrugged.
"It's BLAMMO!" Gem mimed a gun to the side of his head, Gemma nodded enthusiastically in agreement.
"Last I checked, Alphabet Soup was not in the habit of destroying its own assets," K replied, as if the two were telling stories of a flying unicorn.
"But the Complex is!"
"The Complex?"
Over the following hours, she gleaned from them nearly as much as she ever would about their past. The way the twins told it, they had been held, up until five years prior, in an encampment known only as "The Complex," which was part of some effort to locate and nurture physical aptitude as the Soup nurtured mental aptitude... pushing children in bonded pairs, of which, at least in their cadre, only Gem and Gemma were actually twins, to and past their limits in an effort to help them meet their ultimate potential as soldiers. Unlike the Soup, or, at least unlike the Soup in K's experience, they had little tolerance for those who fell behind in training, and may or may not have had a general habit of destroying assets who failed to pass muster. According to Gem and Gemma such "releases" were commonplace during their years there, generally the result of illness or injury to those "released," but also as a punishment for severe insubordination.
K was disinclined to take everything the two said at face value, their mental state being at best somewhat questionable. None the less, despite their cheery demeanor and the ease with which they spoke about their past experiences, she believed that at the very least they thought they were telling the truth.
"Then one day we were on a long march-"
"Long marches are boooooooooooring-"
"You just have to walk and walk and walk and walk and-"
"Gemma passed out."
"It was too hot."
"They said the sun made her sick and we couldn't be soldiers anymore-"
"And Gem couldn't either, since we're twins."
"So they were afraid I'd get it too."
"We thought they'd release us for sure-"
"But we got to come here instead-"
"Except if you don't want our help-"
"Ok! You can help me," K conceded, almost as much to shut them up as anything else. "I'm sure I can find something the two of you can wrap your minds around... what exactly were you trained in?"
"Well we were never very good at drills-"
"And we don't like to follow orders-"
"But we always came first in vehicular operations, hand to hand-"
"And DEMOLITIONS!"
The two dissolved into their own personal little demolition display, complete with onomatopoeic sound effects and wild gesticulation.
"As you may have noticed... there is insufficient room in here for demolitions of any sort," she gestured to their surroundings, the partially crumbling cement cylinder 12 feet in diameter. "We are working small today, and for the foreseeable future. If, and only if, you can learn to control yourselves once the prototyping stage is completed, will I ask our handlers to take us and the suits over to the testing range in block five for full scale trials, in which case you will have the opportunity to fully utilize your vehicular and hand to hand training."
Of course they had in fact learned to control themselves sufficiently for the full scale trials and much more.
That first day they were ready for full scale testing, nearly 6 months later, K had gone with them, the three flanked by Sir, Ma'am, and two of the facility's multitude of nameless and forgettable guards, who in K's recollection all blurred together into a unit of faceless automatons. They were equipment, just like her. She had never, in her memory, been that far from her cylinder within the facility before. By the time she got there, she wasn't even sure if she could find her way back to her cylinder on her own.
"Ok, Gem, I need you to put on the Morph Harness for the Red suit; Gemma, the Yellow."
"Can't I wear the Blue?" Gem whined.
"Blue is way prettier than Red," Gemma agreed.
"I'm sorry, but the Blue suit isn't ready for full scale testing yet, and you know that. I'm still having trouble with the time dilation field. If you want to switch which of you wears the Red and which wears the Yellow, that's fine, but we're not testing Blue today."
"Awwwwwwwwwww! Why not?" they chorused.
"Because it's still too dangerous, that's why. If anything were to happen to one of you..." K trailed off, checking on the two nearly identical suits in their cases. She turned back to see the two looking at her, hopefully. "Do you have any idea how much extra work and money it would take to replace either of you?"
"We like-"
"You too!" they grinned and picked the Morph Harnesses off the cart, helping one another into them.
The two had no qualms about physical contact with each other, frequently engaging in expressions of affection forbidden by Alphabet Soup inter-asset contact protocol. It wasn't just another way they flouted convention at every available opportunity, and it wasn't an indication of a failure to understand the protocols. It had only taken a few irritable reminders from K to get them to comply unwaveringly with the rules where she was concerned. It was, instead, an indication of the underlying fact that they often failed to recognize one another as individuals, rather than extensions of self.
"Ok, now, the hope here, is that, rather than manually 'unzipping' the suits by disengaging the nanomesh along medial lines, and re-assembling the nanofibers around your bodies in the suit application chamber, as before, we should be able to apply the suits to you at any location, so long as you are properly wearing the Morph Harness, via particle teleportation, relying on the data in your datacells to re-assemble a the fully disassembled nanoparticles back into the mesh."
"And if we're not-"
"Wearing them properly?"
"What-"
"Happens then?"
"Worst case scenario? Asphyxiation. Third Degree Burns. Loss of extremities due to suit re-materialization within your bodies."
"You mean like-"
"Our noses?" they asked, going cross-eyed to observe the subject of their query.
"I mean fingers, hands, toes, legs," she replied, irritably. "But," her tone gentled, "I don't anticipate this happening to either of you, so long as you continue operating at your previous competency levels. The worst injury anticipated within the probabilities allowed by the fail safes, is something akin to a full circumference friction burn."
"Like scraped-"
"Knees?"
"Like scraped everything. So just... don't over-tighten the straps," she responded, bluntly and turned on heel, walking some few feet away to boot the transport computer. "You should be able to fit two fingers inside, at the least. If they come in a little baggy this time well, that's better than the alternative. If the two of you would please take a position about half way down the testing range, spacing yourselves equally from one another and from the walls."
The test had been a success, despite her misgivings, and of course the twins were more than delighted with the fireballs created by the energy discharge, which blossomed the planned minimum 3 yards behind them, and the likelihood of which was the primary reason why that particular test needed to be performed on the range. Of course while she had them out there, and suited up (even if the suits were sagging a little in the torso, but at least neither of them was hurt) there was no reason not to test out the suits' specialty attacks, which, while there was some delay on the build up of the Chi attack, and a bit of a problem with deceleration after the burst attack, were none the less successful, and had the added benefit of scaring the daylights out of Ma'am sir and their guards.
It was always amazing to her how much the two could get away with in the name of fully testing out the technology. The damage they caused to the testing range was always written off as a necessary operational expense. They were nearly uncontrollable in the suits... listening only to K's instructions, and then only because they were generally backed up with a very detailed worst case scenario, laid out for them beforehand, as to what could happen if the technology failed. In retrospect, it was a wonder they hadn't shut down the project much earlier, for fear of the threat that the two heavily armed assets could pose should they ever have decided to go rogue while in the testing facility, but they must never have anticipated that the twins would ever deliberately harm their own handlers. They counted on their mental reins to hold firm.
After she'd returned from her own stint in the Complex, later in the testing phase of Project Ranger, the two had even been allowed to take the individual Zords out on night runs around the grounds, while K herself was still confined indoors, monitoring function on her monitors and listening to the sounds of the vehicles rumbling around on the surface above, and Sir and Ma'am pleading over the communications system for Gem and Gemma to follow the set trial course while they ignored their instructions and drove wheresoever they pleased. Listening in on Gem and Gemma, doing their own thing in defiance of Alphabet Soup protocol gave her some small pleasure... goofing off during the tests, when they were too heavily armed to be stopped, was the only manner of rebellion available to them. There was no such avenue available to her... not anymore. As Sir and Ma'am reminded her, far more often than necessary, she could no longer get away with anything after her first attempt at escape. That was why she had to monitor the twins remotely, instead of being allowed to the surface with them, to observe the tests in person.
As much as they'd defied the protocol however, they'd always listened to her instructions, whether it be for a few more hairpin maneuvers to test out the steering controls, or for them to stop immediately before one of the zords suffered a mechanical failure. After their time in the wasteland there wasn't even that. That morning's zord combination test had been the first time since they came back when Gem and Gemma's uncontrollable nature had seriously damaged the project. It had taken the auto repairs 3 hours to straighten out the damage, during which time they were vulnerable to Venjix attack. It hadn't come, thank goodness, until they were back in working order, but now this? K made a note to have a little talk with them at some point, before their insubordination became such a problem that the other Rangers began to notice.
