[Fic] "Makes You Stronger" -- Girl Genius
Summary: A nebulous future-fic about psychic freeloaders and ways to remove them. (800 words)
Note: Written 9/3/18 for
sheliak, in response to the prompt: Agatha Heterodyne (and/or Gil, and/or Tarvek), in order to be resurrected one must first die. It is also a
genprompt_bingo fill for the square suicide. (Nobody actually dies in this story.)
[ETA: the AO3 crosspost is now up!]
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Makes You Stronger
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"Drinking from the Dyne did nothing about Lucrezia the first time, not to mention it very nearly killed you!" Tarvek said, pointing his dessert fork across the workbench with a wide-eyed expression of betrayal. It was adorable, even though Agatha knew it was artificially constructed. She was pretty sure he meant it to cover trained blandness that was covering genuine concern, like a cake whose layers were all different flavors from what they looked like -- ridiculous and far more effort than it was worth to construct, but still delicious. And now she wanted more cake, drat. Fortunately, Gil's staff had already provided.
"Aside from the political disaster your death would precipitate, forgive me for wanting you to wait until I--"
"--until we--" Gil coughed.
"--until I, as the only member of our trio without a nonconsensual mental timeshare, but thank you for your unrequested input, Wulfenbach," Tarvek continued, absently fending Gil away from his half-finished cake slice with an implausibly large needle produced from up his sleeve, "finish designing a psychic removal procedure that is both less absurdly deadly and more likely to produce useful results than hacking at your neural tissue with a bread knife. There's no point repeating failed experiments."
Agatha grinned at him as she cut another slice from the multi-tiered strawberry and chocolate confection currently gracing the center of their little laboratory picnic. "But that's just it! I won't duplicate the conditions exactly -- for one thing, we're certainly not going to repeat your infection and the Si Vales Valeo, fascinating as the new data might be! -- because this time, I won't be wearing my locket. I hypothesize that the suppression mechanism has an unintended side effect of--"
"Oh!" Gil exclaimed, breaking off his attempt to steal Tarvek's cake. "Of course the shield works in both directions, keeping outside forces from interfering with her neural pattern just as it keeps her from interfering with yours. Why didn't we think of that before?"
Agatha loved how easily he could follow her train of thought.
Tarvek blinked. Then he made the needle disappear back up his sleeve and buried his face in his palm. "I'm an idiot."
"Don't be ridiculous; we all missed it," Agatha said around a mouthful of delicious, delicious cake. "The important thing is that I've thought of it now, and once we've used me as a test case, we can adapt the procedure for Gil. He's not a Heterodyne, but the Baron did enough genetic tampering over the years that he ought to survive -- and if not, there's always revivification!"
"I'm opposed on principle to any procedure where revivification is the first backup plan instead of the hundredth," Tarvek grumbled. "It's sloppy."
"It's also not possible in all cases," Gil pointed out. "I was a little distracted at the time, but I think the Castle mentioned explosions as the common method of death-by-Dyne-source. There might not be enough of you to piece back together, even if it does burn your mother out."
"Death by overload, yes, but that's why we'll build energy shunts into the psychic extraction apparatus," Agatha said, waving a bite of cake through a loop-de-loop by way of illustration. "The Castle can always use a bit of extra power, and that way even if I die, it should be from something simple to fix like a heart attack or aneurysm. Easy-peasy!"
Tarvek set down his fork, grabbed a clean napkin, and patted his waistcoat for a pen. "Yes, of course, but how would such an apparatus even work? Dyne energy can be extracted, obviously, but will we be working with that directly or, given that it's channeled through your brain, will we have to convert from something less convenient -- electrochemical nerve impulses, waste heat, etcetera -- into something more readily transmissible, like radio waves or electricity in a metal circuit? How will we determine the variables before--"
"Give me that, your diagram is terrible," Gil said, and yanked the napkin out from under Tarvek's hand. "Obviously you need to put the capacitors in a multi-thread array, not a single-thread chain. And we should find some test subjects to dose with the source before--"
"Your handwriting is terrible," Tarvek shot back, and leaned over Gil's shoulder to cross out his notes. "Those capacitors aren't for the energy shunt, they're for the psychic surgery, which naturally requires a more delicate touch than a oaf like you could possibly--"
Agatha laughed to herself as she finished her second slice of cake.
Then she grabbed an actual notepad from the next workbench over and slammed it down between her boys. "All right! I want my mother out of my head if it kills me, and I won't take no for an answer, from you or the laws of physics. Let's make this work!"
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End of Fic
---------------------------------------------
And that is that for my latest
genprompt_bingo card! \o/
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)
Note: Written 9/3/18 for
sheliak, in response to the prompt: Agatha Heterodyne (and/or Gil, and/or Tarvek), in order to be resurrected one must first die. It is also a
genprompt_bingo fill for the square suicide. (Nobody actually dies in this story.)
[ETA: the AO3 crosspost is now up!]
---------------------------------------------
Makes You Stronger
---------------------------------------------
"Drinking from the Dyne did nothing about Lucrezia the first time, not to mention it very nearly killed you!" Tarvek said, pointing his dessert fork across the workbench with a wide-eyed expression of betrayal. It was adorable, even though Agatha knew it was artificially constructed. She was pretty sure he meant it to cover trained blandness that was covering genuine concern, like a cake whose layers were all different flavors from what they looked like -- ridiculous and far more effort than it was worth to construct, but still delicious. And now she wanted more cake, drat. Fortunately, Gil's staff had already provided.
"Aside from the political disaster your death would precipitate, forgive me for wanting you to wait until I--"
"--until we--" Gil coughed.
"--until I, as the only member of our trio without a nonconsensual mental timeshare, but thank you for your unrequested input, Wulfenbach," Tarvek continued, absently fending Gil away from his half-finished cake slice with an implausibly large needle produced from up his sleeve, "finish designing a psychic removal procedure that is both less absurdly deadly and more likely to produce useful results than hacking at your neural tissue with a bread knife. There's no point repeating failed experiments."
Agatha grinned at him as she cut another slice from the multi-tiered strawberry and chocolate confection currently gracing the center of their little laboratory picnic. "But that's just it! I won't duplicate the conditions exactly -- for one thing, we're certainly not going to repeat your infection and the Si Vales Valeo, fascinating as the new data might be! -- because this time, I won't be wearing my locket. I hypothesize that the suppression mechanism has an unintended side effect of--"
"Oh!" Gil exclaimed, breaking off his attempt to steal Tarvek's cake. "Of course the shield works in both directions, keeping outside forces from interfering with her neural pattern just as it keeps her from interfering with yours. Why didn't we think of that before?"
Agatha loved how easily he could follow her train of thought.
Tarvek blinked. Then he made the needle disappear back up his sleeve and buried his face in his palm. "I'm an idiot."
"Don't be ridiculous; we all missed it," Agatha said around a mouthful of delicious, delicious cake. "The important thing is that I've thought of it now, and once we've used me as a test case, we can adapt the procedure for Gil. He's not a Heterodyne, but the Baron did enough genetic tampering over the years that he ought to survive -- and if not, there's always revivification!"
"I'm opposed on principle to any procedure where revivification is the first backup plan instead of the hundredth," Tarvek grumbled. "It's sloppy."
"It's also not possible in all cases," Gil pointed out. "I was a little distracted at the time, but I think the Castle mentioned explosions as the common method of death-by-Dyne-source. There might not be enough of you to piece back together, even if it does burn your mother out."
"Death by overload, yes, but that's why we'll build energy shunts into the psychic extraction apparatus," Agatha said, waving a bite of cake through a loop-de-loop by way of illustration. "The Castle can always use a bit of extra power, and that way even if I die, it should be from something simple to fix like a heart attack or aneurysm. Easy-peasy!"
Tarvek set down his fork, grabbed a clean napkin, and patted his waistcoat for a pen. "Yes, of course, but how would such an apparatus even work? Dyne energy can be extracted, obviously, but will we be working with that directly or, given that it's channeled through your brain, will we have to convert from something less convenient -- electrochemical nerve impulses, waste heat, etcetera -- into something more readily transmissible, like radio waves or electricity in a metal circuit? How will we determine the variables before--"
"Give me that, your diagram is terrible," Gil said, and yanked the napkin out from under Tarvek's hand. "Obviously you need to put the capacitors in a multi-thread array, not a single-thread chain. And we should find some test subjects to dose with the source before--"
"Your handwriting is terrible," Tarvek shot back, and leaned over Gil's shoulder to cross out his notes. "Those capacitors aren't for the energy shunt, they're for the psychic surgery, which naturally requires a more delicate touch than a oaf like you could possibly--"
Agatha laughed to herself as she finished her second slice of cake.
Then she grabbed an actual notepad from the next workbench over and slammed it down between her boys. "All right! I want my mother out of my head if it kills me, and I won't take no for an answer, from you or the laws of physics. Let's make this work!"
---------------------------------------------
End of Fic
---------------------------------------------
And that is that for my latest
genprompt_bingo card! \o/
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)