Hana's first night at the Rock is one she's going to remember for a long time. Not for the many exciting things that failed to happen, no. It's simply a side-effect of her mind refusing to drift off to sleep. Not entirely surprising – she's never slept well in new environments - but it's a bitch to deal with all the same, being a second night in a row without sleep. It'd be easier if that fucking thing didn't ask her about it out of the blue, the second hour into her tossing on the bed. She did not neglect to tell it that, either.
Insanity is audacity's sister, and there's enough audacity in trying to resurrect Overwatch to fill a city worth of people, but to allow a program this much operating freedom is disconcerting. A criminal act on par with high treason in many parts of the world; Korea at the forefront of it. Hana didn't think she'd add another capital crime to her name so soon. Creating omnics, harbouring omnics, withholding information about omnics. All treason.
For what it's worth, it brings some comfort to her heart that the AI hasn't managed to crack her personal files so thoroughly as to find out her original birthdate. Programs in particular tend to keep themselves up-to-date, so perhaps the billions-upon-billions poured into cyberwarfare are finally cashing in. The thought makes it just a little bit easier to stand the distinct lack of her pistol anywhere within reach.
What history classes she'd had in her time never mentioned anything about Overwatch using an AI. Maybe it's something they teach later-on, but Hana suspects she wouldn't find any information about it even in the college-level textbooks, in a similar fashion to how the available information on the MEKA initiative doesn't mention the age of its latest recruits.
She wonders what European or American books say about Overwatch. History is the one school subject she always found fascinating – not the parts she'd had in classes all those years ago, naturally. Those were as dry and uninteresting as one could present them. But she's played enough games to know it's nowhere near as boring as her teacher would have had her believe.
What will her part in history be? Will she be mentioned as one of the founding members of the new Overwatch, or forgotten, buried under the label of deserter? It depends on their success, probably. It's the winners who she's always played as, and the losers who she always killed; usually omnics, or criminals. And that's what they technically are right now, aren't they? Criminals harbouring a dangerous program.
A groan dies in her throat, and she reaches for the clock she received (she really needs to get a new phone) to check the hour.
5:47
Fuck. When did the doc say she wanted to see her? 8 AM? 8 AM. Two more hours of nothing: Hana's greatest enemy. A war to fight in - that she can survive. To have nothing on her hands is a torture she's simply unaccustomed to. Old phones were dirt cheap even in the camps. Old tech, old games, old anything. Now, fresh things - of the biological variety in particular - those still are much less easily available. Strawberries were one thing in particular she'd only had a chance to try after being drafted. She could eat for a week on the money a kilo of them cost. Ridiculous. She can get more chocolate for that, and honestly she much prefers the taste of the latter. Fills the stomach better, too.
An ugly grimace spreads on Hana's face. She's been fighting her thoughts down all night, but her mind just won't let her sleep, with every last memory provoking another. That won't do.
The girl sits up, wondering. Much as she'd like to fall asleep the next minute, it'll hardly charge her batteries if she needs to get up in less than two hours again; might as well start her day. She'd normally be having a morning drill right about now, anyway. Well, not- not quite now, time zones and all, but around this hour.
Given she's not supposed to exert herself, she can probably skip on some exercise, and start with a shower in the reverse of her daily routine. They need to set something up though, since apparently, everyone just sorta... starts the day at around the same time. No schedule, no pressure. Not an emergency issue, or anything like that. That's what the monkey said, but Mercy laughed at that. An inside joke of theirs? Doesn't matter. Point is, she needs the drills to not go off the rails with her training, and she will without a schedule, eventually. Same with food. A sharp mind can only exist in a healthy body.
That's what the pro's' coaches always say.
That's not today, though. Today she can start with a shower and then- and then she can wait for her appointment with Mercy, and have that tour of the base later. 2 hours to burn.
...They gotta have some spare machines lying around, right? If she could find a working tablet in the trash, then how difficult can it be to acquire one in a military base? She'd be fine with anything, really, it's just the internet that she needs to pass time. Tonight would've been so much easier, shorter, if she hadn't neglected such necessities.
So. First, a shower to finally get the grime off her skin, and then it's a hunt for some poor, lonely PC. There's always her mecha if she doesn't find anything. There are only a few games on it, but it'll do for now. In theory, it could even run Starcraft, but playing without mouse and keyboard would be a pain, not pleasure. Oh. And she can't use her account. How fun. She hasn't had the time to smurf since the draft, and she's never seen an European at Worlds. Should be EZ to climb.
She hops down from her bunk and checks her leg before stepping into a pair of oversized, orange crocs Tracer (!) has gifted her. Her friends would've never let her live this down if they saw her. Still, her only footwear being part of her bloodied suit calls for desperate measures with the coat of dust covering most surfaces of the base.
The pilot grabs the clothing bag she's also been gifted. Old Overwatch uniforms, all of it, none of it actually fits her, but she's hardly picky about those things. Sure, it'd be nice having clothes her size, but complaining about a size (or two, most of it is two) of difference would be petty. The stale smell is hardly an issue, either. In fact, compared to what she used to wear when she was on her own, or even her uniforms in the field, it's downright pleasant. It's all temporary, one way or another. Either they grow and establish the new Overwatch with new and nice things, or they fail - and then it's a death sentence for her, either in a battle or by a firing squad. She hopes it'd be a firing squad and not something meaningless like poison or a noose. What a pathetic death that would be, otherwise, after risking everything for it to mean something. Even less meaningful than being another log to be thrown under the Monster's feet.
Heh. At least she'd go down in history as the first MEKA pilot to be executed. It'd be more remembrance than her team ever got.
Hana fishes out her new training clothes from the bag, well, new, before grabbing a towel and making her way out of her too-empty quarters. It feels strange to have a whole room to herself again. The last time she'd had one would have to be… back in Busan. Back before everything. She wonders if it'll last. The room has beds for eight people; this place must've been lively before Overwatch fell.
Alright. Now, where to? In a true military fashion, every direction looks exactly the same. The door was on her left when she first entered, right?
Probably. Dammit, she needs to sleep.
"Miss Song?" A synthetic voice startles the girl out of her reverie. Hana doesn't even bother trying to hide her scowl. Of course the blasted thing hasn't quit spying on her. Where are the damn cameras?
"Mwo?" she almost doesn't spit out.
"If you're headed for showers, they are located the other way."
She briefly considers going in the direction she picked anyway, just to get it across she doesn't appreciate the surveillance, but assuming it'll even understand her behaviour might well be giving the program too much credit. After all, it didn't get the memo when she outright told it to get lost.
Likely a part of that security protocol Tracer mentioned. Though Hana feels secure in betting her hand the thing is spying on everyone else, and then some.
Without another word, Hana makes her way to the showers. She never asked the thing for help. Her thanks would ring false to the most mediocre voice recognition software, anyway, and this thing has to have a whole server room somewhere, with a wardrobe worth of hardware for pattern recognition. The reminder makes her shudder. Omnics are abominations, but at least they have bodies; hard to destroy, reparable even, but bodies still. If they lose their hard drive, they're done for. Programs though... she could burn one server to ash and they'd just jump to another, suffering only from a loss in computation speed. They could copy themselves onto another server, into an omnic, even onto the internet, leaving Hana able only to stew in helplessness.
She hopes they'll have a hacker on-site to keep an eye on that beast, and soon. Hana doesn't fancy living in a haunted house without an exorcist.
It takes her a few minutes of wandering, but the girl does eventually find the showers. Split by gender and nothing else. That's a flimsy curtain less of privacy than she's gotten used to. MEKA might be a military, but there were some accommodations made for the pilots, an approximation of shower cubicles among them. From what Hana gathered it was quite a recent concession on the MEKA programme's part. Strange, though, given the many ways in which they were conditioned into soldiers, that the brass would draw the line at communal showers. The regulars told her they had no such luxury as privacy during showers - quite like here, only without splitting them by gender. Not much of a problem, that, given she'd seen a grand total of zero women outside the teams in the base; resource management, she's sure. The army draft wasn't expanded even during the worst of the war - would be hard to sustain the war with a fifth of the baby-makers biting the dust, stacking effects and such.
For her part, she'd just been glad to have hot water to clean herself with at the end of the day - well, most days. But what is a three day deployment compared to what she's gotten used to in the camps? It's nice to be clean, but no more than a luxury. One she's going to indulge in however much she can.
A thought crosses her mind as she strips; is the AI still observing her? It's not the place, the possibility doesn't bother her worse than the thing watching her anywhere else in the base, it's just a machine, after all. She's just wondering. What was its designation again?
"Athena?" Silence. "Athena, you there?" Blessed silence.
Then again, it wouldn't surprise Hana for the programme to choose to remain silent in spite of having the capacity to spy on her, it never hurts to suspect the worst of omnics. She'll have to ask someone, but for now? It's time to indulge! Ooh. And it only takes a second for the water to warm up. Nice. It's like this place wasn't built for soldiers.
A smile stretches on the girl's lips when she thinks back to all the times she traded a wash for charging a battery. People don't understand. Which is worse? Stinking like a gutter she went through to find something of value, or going insane with boredom, day after day, with no end to it all in sight - just nothing, over and over with the only routine in her life being a free dinner to distract her for half an hour each day. What a waste of resources it'd have been to spend her rarely existent funds on non-essentials. And people said she had a problem, when it's them who wasted everything they had to smell nice for a few hours before getting dirty again.
The camps by the sea have it easier. Sea water might not be ideal, but salt beats the grime any day.
Which makes her think, they must have a filtering engine here somewhere. The shore is not so far away as to make using pipes impractical, but she can't imagine a facility like this not being self-sufficient in that regard. Even they had their own well at the base, and the barracks are nowhere close to this place, even at a glance.
Even the damn showers are better. Water aside, try as she might, Hana can't get the room to fill with steam. They'd do this every night with her old team, the air sometimes getting so thick she could barely see the fingers of her outstretched arm. In contrast, even as she turns a few other showers on, the air remains stubbornly clear. Someone must've cleaned the ventilation since the Overwatch was revived, or kept it clean before. Another thing to investigate. The shafts she could spot are big enough to fit a cat in, at most, meaning one would have to use a bot, or have an automatic fleet of them, to keep them clean. Chemical attacks have long been one of the favourites among the omnic terror tactics. To have an automated system like that is an unnecessary risk. Something to bring up later.
Hana takes her time scrubbing the sweat off her skin. She runs the water scalding hot, then turns it almost icy cold and back again a few times, messing around with the settings (they have settings!) all the while. She's hardly short on time. She only stops when she does after her still tender leg starts threatening to give out from beneath her. Right. Wonders of medicine only go so far, and Mercy did tell her to take it easy.
She throws on her baggy clothes after drying off before making her way out the showers, every step accented with a wet squelch of her crocks.
"Miss Song." She suppresses a full-body twitch. Great, one step outside and it's already there. "You spent over thirty-three minutes in the showers. Is everything alright?" Ugh.
"What, you don't know?" She mocks it, already on the move to where she thinks her room is.
"There are no electronic devices present within the private areas of the facility." Ah. So soldiers' quarters are not considered a private space here, either, eh? Some things, it seems, are universal. Now if only it'd been a person watching her.
"Miss Song-" the thing starts once more once the girl starts moving again.
"DVa."
"DVa, then. Let me repeat my question. Are you alright?"
Will it shut up if she tells it?
"Yes."
She almost becomes convinced that it's finally let her be when the grating voice sounds out from a nearby wall again.
"I assure you that I hold no ill intent towards you." No, sure, it just stalks her every move so that she doesn't stumble and fall. "Whatever experiences you've had with omnics before, I am here to help Overwatch, and by extension, you."
Hana's bites down on her lip, hard enough to bruise, and still she barely keeps her mouth shut. Keep it together, she's got an impression to make, and giving in to its goading will do her no good here. And it was such a nice shower, too. So of course the program couldn't just let her enjoy her morning for any longer than necessary to continue this charade of civility. Maybe she could just go back to the showers? While she can't be sure the abomination isn't lying, it should leave her alone there, for the sake of appearances, if nothing else.
Yeah, hiding in the bathroom from a disembodied voice… she's a soldier, dammit! A deserter, but still! She didn't run from the Monster, she won't run from a ghost!
Instead, Hana simply keeps her silence as she walks back to her quarters. If the AI expects her to answer to anything other than a direct question, or even that outside of absolute necessity, it's got another thing coming. Besides, silence is all she needs to communicate exactly what she thinks of its words. Perhaps it gets the memo, as this time the thing keeps quiet. Or maybe it froze on expecting an answer?
Who gives a shit?
She neatly lays out her dirty clothes on the same chair she hangs the towel on before throwing herself onto the bed to try and fall asleep once more - any notion of exploring gone from her mind with the AI hanging over her shoulder. It takes all of a minute before the pilot fails to keep herself from tossing and turning, with her gaze falling on the clock once again.
6:31
Fuck.
You better believe I have the audacity to revive a fic with a chapter where basically nothing happens ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)