That They Could Have A Guiding Satellite
Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2023 7:23 pmIn Ashlie's apartment...
The once immaculate and barely lived in apartment of glass-and-metal design aesthetics is in a lot more general disarray these days. Generic pictures of landscapes and abstract art still dot the walls here and there but now there's the detritus of life all around. Some dirty dishes left in the sink, books left on a table and the couch, decorative bowls no longer sit perfectly aligned on a dining table that's never been used, instead a jacket has been haphazardly tossed onto it. The cushions on the couch have mostly been shoved into one corner to create a kind of space of supreme comfy-ness. Shoes lie where they've been kicked off. And then there are the more unusual bits, like a set of unrolled blueprints or a soldering kit along with simple circuit boards and various other electronics.
Ashlie walks past all of it. It's not as neat as it used to be but there's a part of her that enjoys the little signs of life, be they from her or (as most of them are) Heather's doing. After Ashlie's miraculous re-emergence the young Technopath had showed up at her door and decided to move in while simultaneously giving her a cold shoulder the way only teenagers can say 'I missed you and I'm mad you disappeared in the first place'. But either way Heather had decided Ashlie would now fully get to play the role of surrogate parent and Ashlie had been glad to.
Not that it's easy, as Heather has so skillfully demonstrated in the workshop. She's full of repressed anger, abandonment issues, paranoia and an utter lack of boundary issues that come with being a child dependent on Miranda West for a decade and a half. She's yelled at Ashlie, staunchly refuses to do any chores, locks herself in her room at the slightest mishap and constantly combs through any electronics within reach, including Ashlie. A non-insignificant part of network maintenance is ironing out the glitches and non-sense left behind by her chattering with computer processes. Once Ashlie had to spend an hour restoring the grading records because somebody had managed to convince her to change their exam scores in the system.
But underneath that Ashlie could see the brilliant girl shining through. She is compassionate when she manages to let herself care about someone like her friend Nina and she'd gone well beyond what anyone could expect of a teenager when she'd saved Ashlie by going up against a fully-grown adult man. She could tell that given the chance she would be extra-ordinary. Eccentric, almost certainly, but who is she to judge. When allowed to talk to computers and tinker she opened up and she'd obviously been excited about showing her something when she'd run into Lisette and her. It had taken a while but Heather had finally gotten over her perception that modifying electronics intrinsically meant harming them and genuinely enjoyed putting together things that 'sing right'. Which didn't always mean they did something productive or retained whatever function they'd had before she got her hands on them but they always functioned with incredible efficiency and more importantly made her overjoyed to explain what she'd done to Ashlie.
Except today she'd been denied that by circumstance. Holding the now cracked walkie-talkie in her hands Ashlie gently knocks on Heathers door and then sits down with her back to it. She knows she's not going to let her into the room right this second but that's okay. "I have your walkie-talkie. The case cracked a little but I patched it up. Want to tell me what it does?"
The once immaculate and barely lived in apartment of glass-and-metal design aesthetics is in a lot more general disarray these days. Generic pictures of landscapes and abstract art still dot the walls here and there but now there's the detritus of life all around. Some dirty dishes left in the sink, books left on a table and the couch, decorative bowls no longer sit perfectly aligned on a dining table that's never been used, instead a jacket has been haphazardly tossed onto it. The cushions on the couch have mostly been shoved into one corner to create a kind of space of supreme comfy-ness. Shoes lie where they've been kicked off. And then there are the more unusual bits, like a set of unrolled blueprints or a soldering kit along with simple circuit boards and various other electronics.
Ashlie walks past all of it. It's not as neat as it used to be but there's a part of her that enjoys the little signs of life, be they from her or (as most of them are) Heather's doing. After Ashlie's miraculous re-emergence the young Technopath had showed up at her door and decided to move in while simultaneously giving her a cold shoulder the way only teenagers can say 'I missed you and I'm mad you disappeared in the first place'. But either way Heather had decided Ashlie would now fully get to play the role of surrogate parent and Ashlie had been glad to.
Not that it's easy, as Heather has so skillfully demonstrated in the workshop. She's full of repressed anger, abandonment issues, paranoia and an utter lack of boundary issues that come with being a child dependent on Miranda West for a decade and a half. She's yelled at Ashlie, staunchly refuses to do any chores, locks herself in her room at the slightest mishap and constantly combs through any electronics within reach, including Ashlie. A non-insignificant part of network maintenance is ironing out the glitches and non-sense left behind by her chattering with computer processes. Once Ashlie had to spend an hour restoring the grading records because somebody had managed to convince her to change their exam scores in the system.
But underneath that Ashlie could see the brilliant girl shining through. She is compassionate when she manages to let herself care about someone like her friend Nina and she'd gone well beyond what anyone could expect of a teenager when she'd saved Ashlie by going up against a fully-grown adult man. She could tell that given the chance she would be extra-ordinary. Eccentric, almost certainly, but who is she to judge. When allowed to talk to computers and tinker she opened up and she'd obviously been excited about showing her something when she'd run into Lisette and her. It had taken a while but Heather had finally gotten over her perception that modifying electronics intrinsically meant harming them and genuinely enjoyed putting together things that 'sing right'. Which didn't always mean they did something productive or retained whatever function they'd had before she got her hands on them but they always functioned with incredible efficiency and more importantly made her overjoyed to explain what she'd done to Ashlie.
Except today she'd been denied that by circumstance. Holding the now cracked walkie-talkie in her hands Ashlie gently knocks on Heathers door and then sits down with her back to it. She knows she's not going to let her into the room right this second but that's okay. "I have your walkie-talkie. The case cracked a little but I patched it up. Want to tell me what it does?"