Compression & Extraction

I. {#yap01} So, a quick recap since it's been a while since I talked about Corrupt Combustion. Bear in mind that even when we cover the established timeline, a bunch of things are going to be ~~retconned~~ recontextualized. (Now, I'm not taking it completely from the top, read the intro posts if you need that, but do note that specific details of how corruption works and what disassembly drones are have been revised since then.) The story begins with Uzi and Doll giving a presentation on zombies. Rather, it's Doll reading the slides from the presentation she made, only for Uzi to interrupt and start ranting. You know how it goes; "And what have our parents done for the past forever while the world's in a frickin zombie apocalypse? Hide our powers behind this lame as hell masquerade? Anyway, that's why my project is this totally game-changing error blaster!" Teacher rolls his eyes, and the class cringes, only for the gun to glow ominously. Doll tries to save Uzi, which only amounts to the blast hitting both of them. They're sent to the repair ward. Along the way they meet Thad, who mentions that Nori and Yeva are out of the outpost on a mission to investigate a rootkit sighting. Uzi and Doll share a devious look, and begin to plot sneaking out. Next chapter would be Nori's pov, proceeding about identically to her write up, where she saves the Teacher and the Detective from a zombie bearing one of Cyn's corrupting threads. Yeva's pseudo-disassembly drone prosthetics are busted in the fight, and Alice is charged to repair it --- in the process, Alice confirms that whatever Nori & Yeva had seen, it has something to do with the Nightshade Incident, something only the three of them know about; the Nightshade document one of the Wheel Group's most deeply encrypted files. While all this is happening, Uzi and Doll manage to find a mid-level zombie and struggle to take it down. Uzi's error blasters still don't work, but at the edge of defeat, Doll ignites her core, and avoids the zombie's killing blow, launching into a counter-attack. Her defense and offense is seemingly enabled by the environment (industrial ruins, perhaps?), which seemingly to conspire against the zombie and in favor of Doll. Either impossibly unlikely coincidence, or impossibly meticulous planning, or, somehow, foresight? Doll's able to scramble to Uzi's error blaster, and her newfound corruption is exactly what was missing to activate the gun. Doll defeats the zombie, but they both take credit. (It's Uzi's gun, to be fair.) (In the midst of the fight, while she's at the zombie's mercy, something happens to Uzi, too, but not what's supposed to happen. Her core doesn't ignite. But neither does nothing happen --- she gets a message on her inner console. Error: core driver not found. Uzi does her best to repress this, ignoring its implications. It can't be true. Nori has a driver, all her friends have drivers, why would she be any different? Error means something's wrong, but it could be anything --- maybe it's the error that's wrong, actually.) At the outpost, Alice picks up Beau from where he was being babysat by Makarov. When they're back at Alice's cabin, she takes a harsh tone with Beau, half yelling, half whispering. It's not quite anger --- though there're shades of frustration --- it's fear. These are awful omens. Bad things are coming, things even Alice can't protect him from, and Beau needs to man up or die, and Alice isn't going to let him die. They spar, and things proceed along the lines of his write-up; Alice sets her captive sentinels to attack Beau, only for both of them to be surprised that a zombie process has possessed one of the sentinels. Beau activates his disassembly drone arm to fend off beast, but he's ultimately overwhelmed. Nori arrives to save him. After that, Nori makes Beau an effective member of the Wheel Group, and he starts going to class with the rest of the Wheel Group cadets. In a way, the social dynamics are a splash of cold water. His sincere and kindhearted attitude immediately marks him as uncool among the high status boys --- Chad, Brad, and Darren --- and his disassembly drone arm sees him dismissed as freaky by the Lizzy, Rebecca and Doll clique. The first drone who catches his eye is of course Nori's daughter, Uzi. But as soon as he opens a conversation bringing up her mom, Uzi wants nothing to do with him. She's sick of people always comparing her, getting disappointed that she's not living up to standard of the greatest solver, the savior drone. It's a wound that's extra raw, in the wake of her failure to ignite a core. And if Uzi puts extra emphasis on her fiery dismissal of Beau, with longing glances toward Doll, well, Beau can guess what's going on. There's a bit more nuance to it, though. You see, two pretty big things happened in the week or so before Beau joined class. Doll attracted attention and adoration for igniting her core, of course, with half a dozen drones batting eyes at her when just last week she was an unlikeable loner with Uzi. The story changes, day by day, and soon in the version of events everyone's recounting, Doll's entirely responsible for saving the both of them from the zombie. (And how far is that from the truth?) Day by day, there's more people who want to hang out or train with Doll, and instead of spending every evening with Uzi, it's less and less common. Then Lizzy's selfie goes viral. Specifically, she took a selfie in front of a defeated murder drone. A cadet, taking down a ring 1 threat? One day, everyone's talking about Doll, the next, everyone's talking about Lizzy. But Doll's impressed too, and it's the kind of feat that lets Lizzy skip the front of the line for Doll's attention. And then Lizzy posts another selfie --- this one is her and Doll hanging in front of a defeated murder drone, cementing them as an inseparable power duo no one wants to mess with. And --- she never sees it happens, but it's obvious from how they're acting --- Lizzy said something to Doll. Something that made her change how her best friend looked at her. Something that drove a wedge, something that ruined everything. So in midst of all of this, Uzi seethes. She rants in the halls, acts out in class, picks fights. She loudly insists it's not because she wants Doll to pay attention to her again, but every time Lizzy & Doll look at her and blonde snickers while the russian lets her, you can see her expression break. Watching all of this from the outside, Beau keeps his head down. Nori arranged for Thad to train him on how to fight after school. (He's the only cadet ranked as high as semi-ring 1, though there's talk of promoting Lizzy given her latest stunt). Despite (or perhaps because) of his low status, Beau manages to form a kind of friendship with Sam and Emily. Together, the three of them are Ring 4 solver drones (or an anomalous semi-disassembly drone in the case of Beau). Sam's driver is \[Substitution\]. With the snap of his fingers, he can swap states with another drone. If either one is damaged, then the damage is 'traded' from one to the other. The trade can be blocked, but in order to block it, the target must 'bid' more command output than Sam invested in the function. One only needs to worry about this when inflicting damage with the technique, as few would try to block Sam removing their injuries. For this reason, he sees his role as support; when his allies take a beating, he snaps his fingers and suffers for them. (He's taken to using magnets to dull the pain.) Emily's driver is \[Consecration\]. By drawing a cross, Emily can create a 'ward', a partial firewall that corruption cannot pass through. Emily's wards are special; they resist corruption perfectly, as if XORing their bits with themselves. There's a catch, of course --- they cancel all corruption, including her own. This puts Emily in an odd position; her driver inadvertently makes her the weakest solver drone. Corrupt combustion requires oil ignited with corrupt data. Errors yield errors; using corruption creates more corruption, and so most solvers are limited by the fact that too much corruption will overload and crash their systems. Because Emily's builtin command destroys corruption, she struggles to maintain enough corruption to even execute commands Beau, Sam, Emily... the three of them all think the same thing. I can't do anything special, I'll never be a real solver, I'm worthless. Thad thinks this is a bogus attitude. One day, on a lark, he teaches them to play football, and their performance there is about as inspiring. It has nothing to do with their abilities, and everything to do with their attitude. "For real? Are you even trying? You need to get your head in the game. Play to win!" He complains about it to Nori during one of his reports, and Nori rolls her eyes. She has a different idea. "We just need to stop babying them. No one ever learned how to survive on the playground. There's only one way to teach a drone to be a solver. Sink or swim." Thad frowns. "Seems a bit... cruel, doesn't it? Isn't that exactly what Alice did to him---" "No." Nori crosses her arms. If her voice had risen just then, it would be wiser not to comment on it. "There's one crucial difference." "What?" "We'll ask. If they don't want to do it, they can stay in the kiddie pool." "A kiddie pool will still fry your circuits." Nori shrugs. But if the great Nori Doorman thinks it'll make them stronger, who would say no? A coward who'll never save anyone? A washout who'll never amount to anything? Still, none of them say 'yes' immediately; they're all scared, but Nori lays it on thick. Fact is, if they aren't willing to put their lives on the line, what use are they to the Wheel Group? Maybe they could keep trying, maybe they'll be ready one day. But every zombie is a threat to someone, and to refuse this mission is to say they value the certainty of saving their own lives over the chance of saving some