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Jan. 7th, 2012 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rapacityinblueTitle: And The Walls Came Tumbling Down
Fandom: Drama Drama Duck (Inception, Final Fantasy VII)
Spoilers: None
Rating: G
Summary: They're all very hard workers.
Pairing: Gen (Arthur/Eames in game canon)
Word Count: ~1,700
Warnings: Crack!
Notes: I blame Plurk for this one. 500 Themes #36: Caught in the Act
No one would admit to installing it on the computer. It simply appeared on the google chrome home screen on the laptop in the shared office Reeve was working out of, and no one commented on it. They were all, of course, professionals, and no one would stop their work in the middle of the day to play a game -- especially not a game as common as Angry Birds. Especially not when they were working on a project as serious and complicated as this one.
Ariadne knit her brow into a frown, staring hard at the screen in front of her. Although Reeve was, essentially, their boss in this, he was more involved than anyone else she’d worked with, even Saito. And, unlike Saito, he didn’t make a show out of the fact that he was signing their paychecks. Reeve hadn’t bought any airlines, but he was in the office with them every day, collaborating, learning, and helping -- even if it was just on coffee runs.
Now, as Ariadne worked on unraveling this particular knot, Reeve was right beside her, worrying at his lower lip as they stared together at the screen. “Try there,” he suggested, touching the screen briefly before drawing back. She studied the construction of their structure, evaluating weight points and support, before she drew the bird back in the slingshot and let it free. Just as it began its descent, she clicked again, and the bird sped up, powering into the wood and concrete beams.
They shattered, and the whole tower swayed -- before rocking back and settling into place. Not a single stone fell, and the pigs looked completely unmolested. A box appeared in the center of the screen - level failed. Try again?
“Oh, come on!” Aridne cried, at the same time Reeve groused, “That’s ridiculous!”
Arthur watched them from his chair, a frown on his own face. “You do realize this game is not rooted in reality or physics?” he asked.
“Obviously, or we wouldn’t be left with that,” Ariadne huffed, waving a hand at the teetering structure remaining on the screen. “It’s completely structurally unsound, there’s no way it could support it’s own weight --”
“To say nothing of the fact that not a single one of these objects gains velocity as it falls--” Reeve agreed.
“None of those pigs has secured a building permit,” Eames added solomnly.
All three turned to stare at him -- Arthur incredulously, Ariadne and Reeve with a deadly seriousness on their face.
“Eames,” Ariadne said quietly, dangerously. “Take this seriously.”
Eames looked between them and muttered something about finding food. On another continent.
“You know what we should do,” Reeve said. “We should build scale models to show an actual stress test confined by the laws of physics.”
“You’re right!” Ariadne’s face brightened again as she considered. “We could use popsicle sticks for wood, they’re roughly the right density --”
Reeve was warming up to the idea quickly, his own face glowing as he considered. “We could cast a resin with roughly the same tensile strength as glass, so that it wouldn’t shatter when it broke.”
“Is that resin or ice?” Ariadne had begun sketching, a sheet of graph paper stretched before both of them.
“Not even a pig would make a house out ice, Ariadne. Have you ever seen it snow in an Angry Birds level?”
“It does in Seasons!”
“Point,” he allowed.
Arthur watched this all with increasing disbelief. “You know, no one but you cares if the physics aren’t accurate,” he said, but Eames held up a hand and made a shushing motion.
“Don’t stop them, let’s see how far it goes,” he hissed.
Neither Ariadne or Reeve looked very impressed, looking up from their work space with identical glares on their faces. “It’s not just about the physics, Arthur,” Ariadne said. “The architecture is awful, too.”
“Exactly,” Reeve said.
“Just back away slowly,” Eames advised, his eyes comically wide. “Don’t make any sudden movements. This is their natural habitat, Arthur, they’re deadly here. They’re defending their charcoal pencils.”
“Why do they ignore you but everyone glares at me?” Arthur demanded, and Ariadne patted him on the back as she walked by.
“Don’t be so needy, Arthur,” she said.
Days passed, which was unfortunate but also unavoidable, and the madness showed no signs of relenting. If Arthur had ever kept a diary it would have read as follows:
Day 6: Ariadne and Reeve still possessed with strange ideas, show no signs of sane or rational thinking. Eames appears to have succumbed. I fear I am the only sane one remaining in the warehouse. Send help.
At least, that was how his diary would read if it were written by Eames. He knew this because Eames had left exactly those words, scrawled in his abominable penmanship, in a note on Arthur’s desk before he’d joined the others across the warehouse, carefully constructing their “tower” of gravel and popsicle sticks.
“Are we sure those pebbles are to scale?” Ariadne fretted, pushing her hair back. “Their mass needs to be the same --”
“It’s a rough approximation; unless the pigs are expert masons they probably aren’t manufacturing their own boulders,” Reeve pointed out practically.
“Working under the assumption that they’re using found materials, I think the gravel is passable,” Eames intoned. “Not a single level ever showed any sort of manufacturing facility.”
Reeve and Ariadne hummed their agreement. Arthur looked down at the note and realized Eames had misspelled “succumbed.”
The note wrinkled between his forehead and desk.
“What are you going to use for a pig analog?” The question was out before he could stop himself. Stupid, stupid Arthur, what are you doing, asking a question like that? he thought. Don’t feed their delusions! But it was very hard to focus on the article he was reading when the occasional whisper broke through his concentration. He picked up words like “ham” and “eggs” and “bombs,” and wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t talking about breakfast.
But no, it was the game, it was always the game.
“We’ve got ham with the skin still on and we’ve constructed a small cranial approximation to lay it over. If it breaks through to “pop” these balloons --”
“They’re filled with corn starch and liquid, Arthur, they’ve got exactly the density of brains. You have to see this, it’s incredible!” Eames was practically bouncing in his seat.
Reeve continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “--Then we’ll know we have a kill.”
“We need your help, though,” Ariadne put in earnestly.
Arthur rolled his eyes. “Of course you do. With what?”
“I’ve been researching for days and I haven’t found a single species of green pig.”
Arthur had stacks and stacks of file folders filled with spreadsheets and data on their marks. Each one was very heavy and had excellent heft. This one came down on only empty air as Ariadne giggled and ducked out of the way.
In the end, he had to admit that the tower was something to behold once they had it set up. It had grown to encompass the center of the workshop and was fully six feet high, carefully constructed of popsicle sticks, resin glass analog, and stones from the rubble of Midgar.
Ariadne, product of the youtube generation, was behind the camera. Reeve sat before his computer, safely to the side, and Eames -- Eames was gleefully loading birds into their slingshot, laden with gauges and measures, and carefully matching angle and tensile strength as he pulled back.
“Angry Birds example shot one -- poached eggs, world 3, level one!” Ariadne called, like a clapper loader on a film set.
Reeve readied his computer, before calling out the angle and force of his shot as he sent the bird racing forward. On the computer screen, a bird flew through the air in a perfect arc, crashing through stone and taking down the wooden structure. One pig remained, happily shielded by the shifting rubber, blinking lazily at the screen.
“Real life comparison example shot one,” Eames called, checking to make sure his slingshot matched the angle and velocity of the digital bird’s exactly.
This bird flew through the air and collided with their painstakingly built model and, Arthur had to admit, the differences between the two were radical. Eames’s bird hit, and continued on through to the base of their tower, with the force of a small explosion. Each piece it displaced caused a domino effect, toppling the next, until the entire base of their tower was simply gone. Gravity did the rest. It rained gravel and popsicle sticks, and the counter tops ran red with karo syrup and food dye.
“My idea,” Eames confided.
There was a moment of awed silence as the tower came down. Arthur coughed, clearing his throat, and finally said, “Well, it seems you’ve proven your point.”
The wreckage on-screen and in front of him bore no more than a passing resemblance to each other, not only because the game only accounted for 180 degrees of fallout while reality had a full 360. All their pigs were indisputably dead, as opposed to the happy survivor online.
“I’m not convinced,” Reeve said.
And Ariadne said, “I agree.”
Eames added, “I’d really just like to do that again.”
“The popsicle sticks are fairly two dimensional. It looks like they’re using whole chunks of wood.” Reeve said.
“And their triangles are solid pieces; ours have weak spots where we’ve bound them together.” Ariadne said.
“And it’s too much work to rebuild that for every trial,” Eames said, and then added, in case they’d missed it the first time, “And I want to do that again.”
“Obviously, there’s only one solution.” Reeve was busy again, closing the computer and pulling down the graph paper from the high shelf.
“We have to do it in dream space,” Ariadne said.
Eames was already uncoiling lines to the PASIV.
“If anyone needs me,” Arthur said, “I’ll be over here. Sobbing quietly.”
“Enjoy yourself!” His coworkers caroled.
Fandom: Drama Drama Duck (Inception, Final Fantasy VII)
Spoilers: None
Rating: G
Summary: They're all very hard workers.
Pairing: Gen (Arthur/Eames in game canon)
Word Count: ~1,700
Warnings: Crack!
Notes: I blame Plurk for this one. 500 Themes #36: Caught in the Act
No one would admit to installing it on the computer. It simply appeared on the google chrome home screen on the laptop in the shared office Reeve was working out of, and no one commented on it. They were all, of course, professionals, and no one would stop their work in the middle of the day to play a game -- especially not a game as common as Angry Birds. Especially not when they were working on a project as serious and complicated as this one.
Ariadne knit her brow into a frown, staring hard at the screen in front of her. Although Reeve was, essentially, their boss in this, he was more involved than anyone else she’d worked with, even Saito. And, unlike Saito, he didn’t make a show out of the fact that he was signing their paychecks. Reeve hadn’t bought any airlines, but he was in the office with them every day, collaborating, learning, and helping -- even if it was just on coffee runs.
Now, as Ariadne worked on unraveling this particular knot, Reeve was right beside her, worrying at his lower lip as they stared together at the screen. “Try there,” he suggested, touching the screen briefly before drawing back. She studied the construction of their structure, evaluating weight points and support, before she drew the bird back in the slingshot and let it free. Just as it began its descent, she clicked again, and the bird sped up, powering into the wood and concrete beams.
They shattered, and the whole tower swayed -- before rocking back and settling into place. Not a single stone fell, and the pigs looked completely unmolested. A box appeared in the center of the screen - level failed. Try again?
“Oh, come on!” Aridne cried, at the same time Reeve groused, “That’s ridiculous!”
Arthur watched them from his chair, a frown on his own face. “You do realize this game is not rooted in reality or physics?” he asked.
“Obviously, or we wouldn’t be left with that,” Ariadne huffed, waving a hand at the teetering structure remaining on the screen. “It’s completely structurally unsound, there’s no way it could support it’s own weight --”
“To say nothing of the fact that not a single one of these objects gains velocity as it falls--” Reeve agreed.
“None of those pigs has secured a building permit,” Eames added solomnly.
All three turned to stare at him -- Arthur incredulously, Ariadne and Reeve with a deadly seriousness on their face.
“Eames,” Ariadne said quietly, dangerously. “Take this seriously.”
Eames looked between them and muttered something about finding food. On another continent.
“You know what we should do,” Reeve said. “We should build scale models to show an actual stress test confined by the laws of physics.”
“You’re right!” Ariadne’s face brightened again as she considered. “We could use popsicle sticks for wood, they’re roughly the right density --”
Reeve was warming up to the idea quickly, his own face glowing as he considered. “We could cast a resin with roughly the same tensile strength as glass, so that it wouldn’t shatter when it broke.”
“Is that resin or ice?” Ariadne had begun sketching, a sheet of graph paper stretched before both of them.
“Not even a pig would make a house out ice, Ariadne. Have you ever seen it snow in an Angry Birds level?”
“It does in Seasons!”
“Point,” he allowed.
Arthur watched this all with increasing disbelief. “You know, no one but you cares if the physics aren’t accurate,” he said, but Eames held up a hand and made a shushing motion.
“Don’t stop them, let’s see how far it goes,” he hissed.
Neither Ariadne or Reeve looked very impressed, looking up from their work space with identical glares on their faces. “It’s not just about the physics, Arthur,” Ariadne said. “The architecture is awful, too.”
“Exactly,” Reeve said.
“Just back away slowly,” Eames advised, his eyes comically wide. “Don’t make any sudden movements. This is their natural habitat, Arthur, they’re deadly here. They’re defending their charcoal pencils.”
“Why do they ignore you but everyone glares at me?” Arthur demanded, and Ariadne patted him on the back as she walked by.
“Don’t be so needy, Arthur,” she said.
Days passed, which was unfortunate but also unavoidable, and the madness showed no signs of relenting. If Arthur had ever kept a diary it would have read as follows:
Day 6: Ariadne and Reeve still possessed with strange ideas, show no signs of sane or rational thinking. Eames appears to have succumbed. I fear I am the only sane one remaining in the warehouse. Send help.
At least, that was how his diary would read if it were written by Eames. He knew this because Eames had left exactly those words, scrawled in his abominable penmanship, in a note on Arthur’s desk before he’d joined the others across the warehouse, carefully constructing their “tower” of gravel and popsicle sticks.
“Are we sure those pebbles are to scale?” Ariadne fretted, pushing her hair back. “Their mass needs to be the same --”
“It’s a rough approximation; unless the pigs are expert masons they probably aren’t manufacturing their own boulders,” Reeve pointed out practically.
“Working under the assumption that they’re using found materials, I think the gravel is passable,” Eames intoned. “Not a single level ever showed any sort of manufacturing facility.”
Reeve and Ariadne hummed their agreement. Arthur looked down at the note and realized Eames had misspelled “succumbed.”
The note wrinkled between his forehead and desk.
“What are you going to use for a pig analog?” The question was out before he could stop himself. Stupid, stupid Arthur, what are you doing, asking a question like that? he thought. Don’t feed their delusions! But it was very hard to focus on the article he was reading when the occasional whisper broke through his concentration. He picked up words like “ham” and “eggs” and “bombs,” and wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t talking about breakfast.
But no, it was the game, it was always the game.
“We’ve got ham with the skin still on and we’ve constructed a small cranial approximation to lay it over. If it breaks through to “pop” these balloons --”
“They’re filled with corn starch and liquid, Arthur, they’ve got exactly the density of brains. You have to see this, it’s incredible!” Eames was practically bouncing in his seat.
Reeve continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “--Then we’ll know we have a kill.”
“We need your help, though,” Ariadne put in earnestly.
Arthur rolled his eyes. “Of course you do. With what?”
“I’ve been researching for days and I haven’t found a single species of green pig.”
Arthur had stacks and stacks of file folders filled with spreadsheets and data on their marks. Each one was very heavy and had excellent heft. This one came down on only empty air as Ariadne giggled and ducked out of the way.
In the end, he had to admit that the tower was something to behold once they had it set up. It had grown to encompass the center of the workshop and was fully six feet high, carefully constructed of popsicle sticks, resin glass analog, and stones from the rubble of Midgar.
Ariadne, product of the youtube generation, was behind the camera. Reeve sat before his computer, safely to the side, and Eames -- Eames was gleefully loading birds into their slingshot, laden with gauges and measures, and carefully matching angle and tensile strength as he pulled back.
“Angry Birds example shot one -- poached eggs, world 3, level one!” Ariadne called, like a clapper loader on a film set.
Reeve readied his computer, before calling out the angle and force of his shot as he sent the bird racing forward. On the computer screen, a bird flew through the air in a perfect arc, crashing through stone and taking down the wooden structure. One pig remained, happily shielded by the shifting rubber, blinking lazily at the screen.
“Real life comparison example shot one,” Eames called, checking to make sure his slingshot matched the angle and velocity of the digital bird’s exactly.
This bird flew through the air and collided with their painstakingly built model and, Arthur had to admit, the differences between the two were radical. Eames’s bird hit, and continued on through to the base of their tower, with the force of a small explosion. Each piece it displaced caused a domino effect, toppling the next, until the entire base of their tower was simply gone. Gravity did the rest. It rained gravel and popsicle sticks, and the counter tops ran red with karo syrup and food dye.
“My idea,” Eames confided.
There was a moment of awed silence as the tower came down. Arthur coughed, clearing his throat, and finally said, “Well, it seems you’ve proven your point.”
The wreckage on-screen and in front of him bore no more than a passing resemblance to each other, not only because the game only accounted for 180 degrees of fallout while reality had a full 360. All their pigs were indisputably dead, as opposed to the happy survivor online.
“I’m not convinced,” Reeve said.
And Ariadne said, “I agree.”
Eames added, “I’d really just like to do that again.”
“The popsicle sticks are fairly two dimensional. It looks like they’re using whole chunks of wood.” Reeve said.
“And their triangles are solid pieces; ours have weak spots where we’ve bound them together.” Ariadne said.
“And it’s too much work to rebuild that for every trial,” Eames said, and then added, in case they’d missed it the first time, “And I want to do that again.”
“Obviously, there’s only one solution.” Reeve was busy again, closing the computer and pulling down the graph paper from the high shelf.
“We have to do it in dream space,” Ariadne said.
Eames was already uncoiling lines to the PASIV.
“If anyone needs me,” Arthur said, “I’ll be over here. Sobbing quietly.”
“Enjoy yourself!” His coworkers caroled.