Advent Challenge Fic (1/14)
Title: Knife
Fandom: Gorillaz
Rating: E 10+
Characters/Pairing: Cyborg Noodle
Word Count: 858
Summary: When you live on Point Nemo, it is always summer. A story about names and tools and the history of flick knives. (Noodle-bot introspective oneshot written for adventchallenge
AN: Most of what there is about switchblades I had to look up while researching this fic, so if I made any mistakes at all please point them out!
There’s a girl sitting on a little outcrop near the top of Point Nemo, her legs opened to the sun and her eyes focused on something she’s got clenched in her hands. It’s a hot summer day-every day is hot on Point Nemo, choked with the stench of rotting garbage-but she doesn’t seem to notice at all. The girl is wearing an outfir made of thick black leather covered in zippers and buttons and plugs to shove wires into, and her arms and legs are covered by brown gloves and work boots. She is not sweating, which is a good thing because she will malfunction if she gets wet. She is not human.
Her name is Noodle.
It’s a hand-me-down name, taken from a little girl who went to Hell and never came back, but she’s fond of it nonetheless. A name was more than she expected when she first came online, more than Murdoc gives the rest of his tools. And anyway, it has a good sound to it. Noo~oodle. She’s a robot, so she doesn’t quite feel excitement, but nonetheless she is looking forward to the day that Murdoc Niccals (Bass player, Gorillaz leader, God) works out the remaining bugs in her voice chip. She wants to be able to say her name.
Weapons of all sorts, from handguns to grenade launchers, are spread out around Noodle while seagulls shriek and wheel in lazy circles around her head. Far below her, black oily waves are crashing against the pepto-bismol shore of her home. (Murdoc’s taste in color is something else, that’s for sure.) She’s not paying attention to any of those things, though. Right now, she is cleaning. Noodle has focused on this task in a way that only a being of infinite patience can.
What she’s holding is a knife. Or, to be more specific, an antique flick knife, tarnished and rusted almost beyond recognition. (Beautiful, though, lovely in a way that only a weapon can be.) She found it late last night while roaming along the beach. It was a struggle to get without frying her circuits, to be sure, but oh so worth it. Noodle’s new knife is precious, just like all her pretty little killers.
The knife is quite old, (Everything seems old by the standards of a girl born less than a year ago) almost certainly pre-1950. It probably saw the golden days of switchblades, before The Toy That Kills was ever even published.
(Noodle very rarely feels an urge to kill people. She has a body count in the hundreds, yes, but a very few of those are by her own desire. Murdoc says shoot and she does without hesitation-that’s simply how it is. If she were ever to somehow meet Jack Harrison Pollack, though, she would take an incredible delight in rending him from limb to limb.)
That’s really not worth thinking about though-while Murdoc has a mind like a blade and probably could invent a time machine if he ever really put his mind to it, he’s been spending far too much time drunk to consider anything more complicated than getting himself dressed in the morning. (And sometimes not even that-Noodle is quite grateful for her underdeveloped sense of smell sometimes.) The only other constant on the island is 2D (Stuart Pot, Guitarist and Lead Singer of Gorillaz, Completely Useless) and Noodle isn’t entirely sure the man even knows his times tables.
Noodle is rubbing the knife with a coat of oil and white vinegar, thorough and patient. She’s been going at it like this for hours, trying all sorts of different techniques she downloaded from the internet. Her knife is almost clean. It’s not like new, probably will never be like new again because some bastard who didn’t know what he had (an exquisite piece of gleaming metal, ready to stab, to twist and kill) decided to throw it away. But nonetheless, her treasure is perfect.
Noodle presses the button to unlatch the knife, opening and closing and opening it again. The blade still doesn’t respond quite right, but the knife is sharp and well-worn and it fits smoothly into the palm of her hand. Now all it needs is a name.
Noodle names all her weapons, short sensible names that would be easy to remember even without her perfect recall. (The handgun behind her is known as Richard. The rifle to her right is called Martha.) This one, though, Noodle isn’t quite sure what to call. The weapon isn’t like her others-it’s unlikely she’ll ever use it in combat, not with all her state-of-the-art machinery-but she’s impossibly fond of it nonetheless. It’s dangerous but impractical, beautiful but hard to care for, plenty of work but worth every second of it.
Ah, Noodle thinks, and realizes she knows exactly what she’s going to call it.
Hello, Murdoc, she thinks but doesn’t say; because her voice isn’t something anyone can understand. Not yet.
It’s a hand-me-down-name, taken from a disgusting wreck of a man who doesn’t know what it means to have boundaries, but it’s perfect.
(Noodle thinks he might be perfect too.)
Fandom: Gorillaz
Rating: E 10+
Characters/Pairing: Cyborg Noodle
Word Count: 858
Summary: When you live on Point Nemo, it is always summer. A story about names and tools and the history of flick knives. (Noodle-bot introspective oneshot written for adventchallenge
AN: Most of what there is about switchblades I had to look up while researching this fic, so if I made any mistakes at all please point them out!
There’s a girl sitting on a little outcrop near the top of Point Nemo, her legs opened to the sun and her eyes focused on something she’s got clenched in her hands. It’s a hot summer day-every day is hot on Point Nemo, choked with the stench of rotting garbage-but she doesn’t seem to notice at all. The girl is wearing an outfir made of thick black leather covered in zippers and buttons and plugs to shove wires into, and her arms and legs are covered by brown gloves and work boots. She is not sweating, which is a good thing because she will malfunction if she gets wet. She is not human.
Her name is Noodle.
It’s a hand-me-down name, taken from a little girl who went to Hell and never came back, but she’s fond of it nonetheless. A name was more than she expected when she first came online, more than Murdoc gives the rest of his tools. And anyway, it has a good sound to it. Noo~oodle. She’s a robot, so she doesn’t quite feel excitement, but nonetheless she is looking forward to the day that Murdoc Niccals (Bass player, Gorillaz leader, God) works out the remaining bugs in her voice chip. She wants to be able to say her name.
Weapons of all sorts, from handguns to grenade launchers, are spread out around Noodle while seagulls shriek and wheel in lazy circles around her head. Far below her, black oily waves are crashing against the pepto-bismol shore of her home. (Murdoc’s taste in color is something else, that’s for sure.) She’s not paying attention to any of those things, though. Right now, she is cleaning. Noodle has focused on this task in a way that only a being of infinite patience can.
What she’s holding is a knife. Or, to be more specific, an antique flick knife, tarnished and rusted almost beyond recognition. (Beautiful, though, lovely in a way that only a weapon can be.) She found it late last night while roaming along the beach. It was a struggle to get without frying her circuits, to be sure, but oh so worth it. Noodle’s new knife is precious, just like all her pretty little killers.
The knife is quite old, (Everything seems old by the standards of a girl born less than a year ago) almost certainly pre-1950. It probably saw the golden days of switchblades, before The Toy That Kills was ever even published.
(Noodle very rarely feels an urge to kill people. She has a body count in the hundreds, yes, but a very few of those are by her own desire. Murdoc says shoot and she does without hesitation-that’s simply how it is. If she were ever to somehow meet Jack Harrison Pollack, though, she would take an incredible delight in rending him from limb to limb.)
That’s really not worth thinking about though-while Murdoc has a mind like a blade and probably could invent a time machine if he ever really put his mind to it, he’s been spending far too much time drunk to consider anything more complicated than getting himself dressed in the morning. (And sometimes not even that-Noodle is quite grateful for her underdeveloped sense of smell sometimes.) The only other constant on the island is 2D (Stuart Pot, Guitarist and Lead Singer of Gorillaz, Completely Useless) and Noodle isn’t entirely sure the man even knows his times tables.
Noodle is rubbing the knife with a coat of oil and white vinegar, thorough and patient. She’s been going at it like this for hours, trying all sorts of different techniques she downloaded from the internet. Her knife is almost clean. It’s not like new, probably will never be like new again because some bastard who didn’t know what he had (an exquisite piece of gleaming metal, ready to stab, to twist and kill) decided to throw it away. But nonetheless, her treasure is perfect.
Noodle presses the button to unlatch the knife, opening and closing and opening it again. The blade still doesn’t respond quite right, but the knife is sharp and well-worn and it fits smoothly into the palm of her hand. Now all it needs is a name.
Noodle names all her weapons, short sensible names that would be easy to remember even without her perfect recall. (The handgun behind her is known as Richard. The rifle to her right is called Martha.) This one, though, Noodle isn’t quite sure what to call. The weapon isn’t like her others-it’s unlikely she’ll ever use it in combat, not with all her state-of-the-art machinery-but she’s impossibly fond of it nonetheless. It’s dangerous but impractical, beautiful but hard to care for, plenty of work but worth every second of it.
Ah, Noodle thinks, and realizes she knows exactly what she’s going to call it.
Hello, Murdoc, she thinks but doesn’t say; because her voice isn’t something anyone can understand. Not yet.
It’s a hand-me-down-name, taken from a disgusting wreck of a man who doesn’t know what it means to have boundaries, but it’s perfect.
(Noodle thinks he might be perfect too.)