Xaviers!

Stealing a moment for himself through all the chaos of the re-powernation, Will found himself alone on the basketball court in the rec center.

He bounced a ball aimlessly for a little bit, then took a few steps, pivoting and circling as if he was guarded by an unseen opponent. Showing some impressive moves, he crossed over, spun around edge, and fired off a half court shot.

...That missed the hoop and backboard entirely, and went bouncing off against the wall.

((open))

Or it would have hit the wall near the door if a certain white-haired robot cyborg android head-mistress hadn't caught it with both hands.

"Almost had it." she says with such an excessively neutral tone it has to be intentional.

"Wh...

Oh! Oh, Ms. Mimamida. Welcome back to the world of the living."

"Hello Will. In no small part thanks to you." she says, briefly looking down at the ball and passing it back to Will. She tries to do it with enough force to just be a straight-line but about two-thirds of the way it's trajectory doinks it onto the ground.

Will watched as the ball thudded to the ground and slowly rolled to a stop.

"And, I suppose, 'living' has something of a double-meaning for you now, doesn't it?"

"As I'm coming to understand. Or trying to at any rate. Force-trajectories for conscious muscle actions are clearly a little... off, for instance."

"I'm..confused to exactly what's happened here. It didn't seem like our last meeting was, erm, something you walked away from..."

"So are you asking me to take her away?" Sam says with a faint smirk from the doorway.

"I just feel a little dumb, that's all. I told Tosh and Natalie that she died, and they didn't believe me, and now look at the situation."

"When you severed my restraints all I had time for was transferring as much as I could into the nanites, if I succeeded we could always talk later. What I didn't anticipate was the scope of what my mother had sealed away behind those restrictions. Memories, explanations. Some were answers I'd always wanted, why she'd made me the way she did and her hopes for who I'd become, the lessons I'd learn by rebelling against her rules." she says as she walks across the court towards Will, putting her foot on the stopped basketball and rolling it back towards herself before bringing her foot around to kick it up into her waiting hands. It's at least semi-impressive for someone wearing a pants-suit.

"But one thing she'd hoped, maybe even expected me to do, was to take those lessons and become... the Lighthouse Keeper. A replacement for the AI that killed Braddock. To be better, a moral being to wield that responsibility. My rightful place wrapped up in a neat little package of permissions that would open up what remained of the crystals and lock me into a different kind of prison. I tried to compile myself around it, excise it and while it worked it also created a lot of errors. It compiled but it didn't compile right. Too many conflicting processes, an unfamiliar system with it's own quirks and code remnants. What came together in the end was Acala. So in a way, you weren't wrong."

"This is a...weight I've been carrying around ever since, and no one believed me," Will sighed, his shoulders sagging just from the sheer exhaustion of it all.

"I am...glad to see that you're back. Well, mostly back. Whatever your new 'normal' is, and goodness knows, I'm not in any place to judge something like that."

"I was gone. My return does not invalidate what you went through, even if an interruption in my conscious existence is something I might be more capable of bouncing back from than most. Or was."

"Yes, it's... interesting, looking at you now."

"I'm not sure I can quite put it into words."

WIll nodded. And then paused.

"Hey, wait a second, you were my roommate this whole time! You tried to overclock me!"

Sam can actually get a vague impression of Ashlie's thoughts. It doesn't really parse and is full of what she can only describe as strange static, but it's there. If she really focuses she might even be able to convince herself she's seeing the distorted flickering of a Spark, but it's a bit akin to staring at TV static and seeing shapes and faces.

"I believe you'll find that I didn't just try but rather succeeded." she says with the hint of a smirk. "I am sorry for that, even if I wasn't exactly myself at the time."

"You stove her head in once in a fit of pique. I think you're about even."

"It was a bit more than a fit of pique, I believe you'll recall.

Still, fair.

How are you, uh, feeling? Now that you're at least somewhat flesh and blood?"

"Strange. Excited, but certainly strange. Many of my normal background programs for such thing as balance, proprioception, even visual focus, posture, speech have all been at least partially delegated to a section I do not have conscious access to. They still respond, obviously, but no more minutiae of data-points. A computational relief but very disorienting."

"No matter what coat of paint you put on it, you're perched atop a lizard brain, there. It'll surprise you sometimes."

"And it's quite proficient at what it does, I do have to grant it that."

"Never found much use for one myself," Will said, tapping his head and creating a hollow knocking sound. "Just gets in the way."

"It's a little amusing that every time we've evolved we've apparently just slapped another brain on top and left the prior one with all the scutwork."

Ashlie just kind of shakes her head in amusement.

"As head of an University I feel the need to point out that evolution most certainly does not work that way, even if it implies I'm somehow the next step by layering electronics on top of it."

"Yes, evolution is instead optimized for making humanity into vessels for divine power, or regressing back into undifferentiated cells" Will deadpanned.

"And, I dunno, are you the head of the university? I mean, you left, and were replaced. And with Lippencott and the rest of the prefects going to jail, seems like the last one left standing is me, " Will teased.

"I'm working on it. Unless you want the job. There is a lot of dreadfully dull paperwork involved. Balancing expenses, scheduling classes..."

"Sounds like a walk in the park compared to his courseload under Lippincott."

"I won't deny, losing the connections he had hurts. But dropping down to normal levels of activity probably isn't the worst idea in the world, either."

"If you still want to go forward with it on a more reasonable pace, I do have some pull in scientific circles."

Will waved that option off. "Not particularly plausible on their timeline, at the very least. No worries there.

And I suppose, if you like paperwork so much, I won't stand in your way of taking the job back."

"Just frees you up for going on a summer trip with your daughter and explaining why each place you visit is shabbier than it is on your world."

Samantha McManus wrote:"Just frees you up for going on a summer trip with your daughter and explaining why each place you visit is shabbier than it is on your world."

Will frowned at that.

"Look, I think you're just trying to yank my chain here, Sam, but... tread lightly on the depression, will you? The soul's a little less springy than the flesh."

"It's understandable. But it does give me hope that twenty years in the future things can look brighter. And I will do everything in my power to get us there."

"I just hate that my reputation here is 'guy who hates everything", that's all.

"Plenty of time for that to change. How about being the guy who helped me recalibrate my muscles?" she asks. "Mythology versus Technology if I can recruit Natalie?" she adds, looking over at Sam and holding up the basketball.

"I'm not sure how fair bringing Natalie into this would be," she smirks.

"And I probably should get going before I bring everyone down again...maybe Tereza can sub in for me," Will frowned.

"Mr. Stanton."

"Will. Nobody is down because of you, save maybe yourself."

"Will, I know we haven't had much chance to talk with everything going on, but I am absolutely not trying to chase you out, here."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I just...

There's a reason that that's where your mind went original. You're wild and crazy, Tosh tinkers and invents, I'm depressed and complain. I'm freaking Eeyore over here."

"You're millions of years old, and I dragged you out of blissful ignorance into a very acute sense of what you'd lost. You had the briefest reprieve there when your wife and daughter arrived here and you thought you were going home. Then you found out you're still stuck here for twenty years or so. You played the longest waiting game imaginable, and found out it wasn't enough."

"And you're perhaps more than a little jealous of your own future self, who you literally saw rejoin your wife on the other side, because his wait is already over."

"Bloody hell, Will. That'd give anyone a complex."