(no subject)
Oh, I keep forgetting to put this up here. It was for the... March? challenge at fear_the_editor, this was written to the prompt "explaining something scientific." Pretty dry stuff, though I did my best to have Kozi be entertaining enough to keep the reader awake.
Researching and writing this made me fall in love with Kozi almost as much as I was already in love (and continue to be ♥) with Yu~ki. *g* They're very interesting guys. I hope I didn't do them too much of an injustice. Yu~ki doesn't appear in this part, this is just kind of an... AU snippet of what's happening in "Fighting Spirit" when Gackt is out being emo on the loading dock. The actual full story of this side is gonna have a lot less Mana pedantery, I promise... though just as much crack. *shrugs and grins* Sorry...
I'd put this around a PG-13. Maybe R. Swearing, Kozi abuse, description of porn, Mana heterosexuality (*gasp*), a bit of random violence. And, you know, the crack. Always the crack.
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Kozi poked his head over Mana's shoulder. "Whatcha doin'?"
Mana turned to eye Kozi crankily, the look alone speaking volumes. Kozi grinned cheerfully at the odd little pile of equipment Mana had been fiddling with, and said, "Yes, Mana-sama, I will return to proper speech now."
"As much as you ever do," muttered Mana, and he turned back to the cables under his hands.
"What was that?" Mouth gaping in a pantomime of utter shock, Kozi leaned forward with precarious balance, turning his head upside-down to stare Mana in the eyes. "Did a deep voice issue from the painted mouth of our lovely Mana? Unprecedented!"
Mana rolled his eyes and shoved at Kozi's shoulder, tumbling him sideways to lay on the riser that Mana knelt before. At close range to the odd things Mana was connecting to each other, Kozi made faces at them for a little time before sitting up and scruffling his hands through his wavy mop of brown-blond hair. "So what is it that you're doing here, babe." He cocked a mild eyebrow at his once more focused friend.
Mana frowned at the small rectangular object in his hands and murmured absently, "Setting up..." He held it above a piece of paper to his right, apparently comparing its appearance with that of the drawing and oblivious to the blank, frustrated stare Kozi gave him.
"Yeah, I knew that... setting up what? Or is it a secret?" He waggled his eyebrows. Sometimes it took several proddings to bring Mana to the point of coherent communication with other mortals. Or at least to saying something Kozi could comprehend without resorting to a technical dictionary. He was good with guitars, certainly, but for anything beyond that, technology could go fuck itself sideways and he'd be just as pleased.
Mana lifted his head at this, and... was that a blush? Oh, surely... Kozi could hardly hold back a reflexive snicker as he watched Mana sort through possible answers, dismissing each one, all the while with the faintest - but readily apparent to Kozi, having observed Mana at close range for five years now - hint of red to his cheeks.
"It's... well. Hm." Mana shifted his gaze from the thing in his hands to Kozi and back again. "Not really a secret, as such. Not from you, I should say." At this, the blush darkened.
Kozi sat bolt upright and leaned in to examine Mana's cheeks, swaying like a snake to eye all angles. Mana gave him a tight little glare, but didn't say anything. It would only give Kozi more fodder for his already certain teasing. "Sooooo..." Kozi purred. "Something very interesting about this particular pile of... whatever it is... or is the more interesting part who it's a secret from, and why?"
Mana grimaced and said, "The second, of course. Please don't press it? I will tell you later, if you want to know so very badly. For now - here, look." He held up the gray whatever-it-was for Kozi's perusal, looking amused when the other man's expression remained plainly curious. "You're like a cat, I swear. Everything remotely odd that you see, you have to poke at. Even if you will never have any clue what its actual use is, you still have to get into it."
Kozi looked up, miffed. "Hmmph!" He dropped his gaze again, reaching out a calloused finger to prod the spongy material over the cone at the thing's top. "I show an active involvement in my environment, is what. Unlike some people... whose entire purpose in existence seems to be quashing everyone else's fun!" He made a bratty face at Mana, sticking out his tongue fast as a snake. Mana'd made a habit of snapping his hand up to snag the tip of Kozi's tongue whenever he did that in the early days of their odd friendship. Kozi had learned the painful way to flick his tongue out and back like lightning, if he did it at all in front of Mana... who shook his head now, expression a cross between amusement and apparent regret at having had his hands full. "Missed, ha!" Kozi grinned.
"Quiet, you." Mana turned around and sat on the riser. "All right. What I have here is a brand new, shiny, very expensive but irresistable little milestone in video recording technology." He paused, raising an eyebrow at Kozi. "You know what a video is, do you not?"
Kozi gave him a disbelieving stare before tilting his head sideways and saying, "Well, gee, Mana... I dunno... is that maybe some of them there things that you stick in the slot under the tv and it makes there be porn?"
He barely registered the pale blur moving toward him at high speed before he was knocked flat on the floor. Blinking, he reached one hand up to touch his jaw... still there, good. It was numb. In another minute, undoubtedly, he'd be desperately wishing it had remained numb. No matter how uneasy it made him for the lower right side of his face to have apparently vanished...
"Okay... okay... Mana-sama... I get it. Shit." He sat up slowly, holding one hand up before him in both a plea for peace and a precaution against further Manaical wrath. "Don't make me write it on the whiteboard this time, please?"
Mana's glare remained unsoftened. "I should. Your pathetic scribble could use the refinement."
Kozi winced at the memory of six hours with Mana correcting every millimeter of fault in his handwriting, and put on his very best kicked puppy attitude. "Please, Mana-sama. Uhm... what were you saying about this before I went on my ill-considered tangent?" He waved at the shiny gray-and-black rectangular object in Mana's right hand, blinking prettily for helpful emphasis.
"You..." Mana closed his eyes and took a deep breath, exhaling in a rush through his nose. "This. This is the world's first digital camcorder, Kozi. Before you ask what that means, because if you do so, I shall not be responsible for the actions of my left hand in regard to your face, allow me to explain from the point at which you clearly have comprehension." His eyes narrowed and his hand twitched slightly at the reference to Kozi's flippant outburst.
Kozi kept his mouth firmly shut, and nodded as meekly as he could manage.
Face smoothing to its neutral mask, Mana looked down at the 850,000 yen chunk of plastic and metal and said, "Your porn, Kozi, uses analog magnetic tape as a data medium. Particles on the tape are oriented in patterns that your VCR can read and decode. The VCR turns the decoded patterns into a signal that is identical to that of your pay-per-view cable channels, and your television uses this signal - regardless of where it originated - to recreate, dot by dot, the naked woman handcuffed to the bars of her cell while three cops take turns exploring her various orifices with whichever extremity appeals."
At that, Kozi scowled and said, "Dammit, Mana, you asked if you could play your video games while you took care of the cats, not invade my porn stash!"
Mana raised a langorous eyebrow. "Well, it was only fair; you were spending every night in a different strip club in Guam, adding dollars to g-strings with your teeth, while I spent every night fending off the unnatural fascination that Raka's teeth apparently have with my ears. Watching your porn was the most innocuous revenge that I could have taken by far." He smirked slightly at Kozi's indignant snort, and said, "The flaws of analog recording lie primarily in its susceptibility to noise and artifact transfer, as well as deterioration of signal strength and clarity as the tape ages. Copies that are made from the original tape will have a lower signal-to-noise ratio. In copies made from the copies, it will be lower still, as the noise inherent to each tape is added to the recording and the original signal becomes less distinct." He paused, assessing the present level of Kozi's inevitable decline into befuddlement. "You are not lost already, are you?"
Kozi's jaw was beginning to throb, and his eyes had gained a wild look as Mana began speaking in greater percentages of gibberish. "Not really, yet, but Mana... Japanese. Please. Not tech-ese." He threw a pleading look to the impassive closet geek in front of him.
"I cannot believe you sometimes," Mana snorted, but tilted his head in assent. "Tape equals unreliable, understand? But for now, it is what we have to work with. This camera does use tape. What makes it special is that it uses digital encoding, rather than analog, on that tape."
Kozi sighed. "Digital."
"Digital. Instead of exactly reproducing the signal as received by the lens, it samples that signal and converts each sample into a pattern of set highs and lows. Each part of the pattern is called a bit. There are extra bits included to check for corruption and errors, and in the case of such errors, to allow the decoding device to recreate at least some of the lost signal." Kozi's eyes had glazed over, Mana noted with a mix of exasperated despair and fondness. "Look, the point is that it's inconvenient to edit and copy analog tape and you get bad results anyway. With this, I can connect it to my computer and use various programs to do anything I want with the video, and any copies will be almost perfectly identical to the original. Does that work for you?"
Kozi perked up and said, "Why the fuck didn't you just say that to begin with?"
A low moan escaped as Mana lowered his head to rest on the dully shimmering video camera.
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Thanks for reading. ^_^
Researching and writing this made me fall in love with Kozi almost as much as I was already in love (and continue to be ♥) with Yu~ki. *g* They're very interesting guys. I hope I didn't do them too much of an injustice. Yu~ki doesn't appear in this part, this is just kind of an... AU snippet of what's happening in "Fighting Spirit" when Gackt is out being emo on the loading dock. The actual full story of this side is gonna have a lot less Mana pedantery, I promise... though just as much crack. *shrugs and grins* Sorry...
I'd put this around a PG-13. Maybe R. Swearing, Kozi abuse, description of porn, Mana heterosexuality (*gasp*), a bit of random violence. And, you know, the crack. Always the crack.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kozi poked his head over Mana's shoulder. "Whatcha doin'?"
Mana turned to eye Kozi crankily, the look alone speaking volumes. Kozi grinned cheerfully at the odd little pile of equipment Mana had been fiddling with, and said, "Yes, Mana-sama, I will return to proper speech now."
"As much as you ever do," muttered Mana, and he turned back to the cables under his hands.
"What was that?" Mouth gaping in a pantomime of utter shock, Kozi leaned forward with precarious balance, turning his head upside-down to stare Mana in the eyes. "Did a deep voice issue from the painted mouth of our lovely Mana? Unprecedented!"
Mana rolled his eyes and shoved at Kozi's shoulder, tumbling him sideways to lay on the riser that Mana knelt before. At close range to the odd things Mana was connecting to each other, Kozi made faces at them for a little time before sitting up and scruffling his hands through his wavy mop of brown-blond hair. "So what is it that you're doing here, babe." He cocked a mild eyebrow at his once more focused friend.
Mana frowned at the small rectangular object in his hands and murmured absently, "Setting up..." He held it above a piece of paper to his right, apparently comparing its appearance with that of the drawing and oblivious to the blank, frustrated stare Kozi gave him.
"Yeah, I knew that... setting up what? Or is it a secret?" He waggled his eyebrows. Sometimes it took several proddings to bring Mana to the point of coherent communication with other mortals. Or at least to saying something Kozi could comprehend without resorting to a technical dictionary. He was good with guitars, certainly, but for anything beyond that, technology could go fuck itself sideways and he'd be just as pleased.
Mana lifted his head at this, and... was that a blush? Oh, surely... Kozi could hardly hold back a reflexive snicker as he watched Mana sort through possible answers, dismissing each one, all the while with the faintest - but readily apparent to Kozi, having observed Mana at close range for five years now - hint of red to his cheeks.
"It's... well. Hm." Mana shifted his gaze from the thing in his hands to Kozi and back again. "Not really a secret, as such. Not from you, I should say." At this, the blush darkened.
Kozi sat bolt upright and leaned in to examine Mana's cheeks, swaying like a snake to eye all angles. Mana gave him a tight little glare, but didn't say anything. It would only give Kozi more fodder for his already certain teasing. "Sooooo..." Kozi purred. "Something very interesting about this particular pile of... whatever it is... or is the more interesting part who it's a secret from, and why?"
Mana grimaced and said, "The second, of course. Please don't press it? I will tell you later, if you want to know so very badly. For now - here, look." He held up the gray whatever-it-was for Kozi's perusal, looking amused when the other man's expression remained plainly curious. "You're like a cat, I swear. Everything remotely odd that you see, you have to poke at. Even if you will never have any clue what its actual use is, you still have to get into it."
Kozi looked up, miffed. "Hmmph!" He dropped his gaze again, reaching out a calloused finger to prod the spongy material over the cone at the thing's top. "I show an active involvement in my environment, is what. Unlike some people... whose entire purpose in existence seems to be quashing everyone else's fun!" He made a bratty face at Mana, sticking out his tongue fast as a snake. Mana'd made a habit of snapping his hand up to snag the tip of Kozi's tongue whenever he did that in the early days of their odd friendship. Kozi had learned the painful way to flick his tongue out and back like lightning, if he did it at all in front of Mana... who shook his head now, expression a cross between amusement and apparent regret at having had his hands full. "Missed, ha!" Kozi grinned.
"Quiet, you." Mana turned around and sat on the riser. "All right. What I have here is a brand new, shiny, very expensive but irresistable little milestone in video recording technology." He paused, raising an eyebrow at Kozi. "You know what a video is, do you not?"
Kozi gave him a disbelieving stare before tilting his head sideways and saying, "Well, gee, Mana... I dunno... is that maybe some of them there things that you stick in the slot under the tv and it makes there be porn?"
He barely registered the pale blur moving toward him at high speed before he was knocked flat on the floor. Blinking, he reached one hand up to touch his jaw... still there, good. It was numb. In another minute, undoubtedly, he'd be desperately wishing it had remained numb. No matter how uneasy it made him for the lower right side of his face to have apparently vanished...
"Okay... okay... Mana-sama... I get it. Shit." He sat up slowly, holding one hand up before him in both a plea for peace and a precaution against further Manaical wrath. "Don't make me write it on the whiteboard this time, please?"
Mana's glare remained unsoftened. "I should. Your pathetic scribble could use the refinement."
Kozi winced at the memory of six hours with Mana correcting every millimeter of fault in his handwriting, and put on his very best kicked puppy attitude. "Please, Mana-sama. Uhm... what were you saying about this before I went on my ill-considered tangent?" He waved at the shiny gray-and-black rectangular object in Mana's right hand, blinking prettily for helpful emphasis.
"You..." Mana closed his eyes and took a deep breath, exhaling in a rush through his nose. "This. This is the world's first digital camcorder, Kozi. Before you ask what that means, because if you do so, I shall not be responsible for the actions of my left hand in regard to your face, allow me to explain from the point at which you clearly have comprehension." His eyes narrowed and his hand twitched slightly at the reference to Kozi's flippant outburst.
Kozi kept his mouth firmly shut, and nodded as meekly as he could manage.
Face smoothing to its neutral mask, Mana looked down at the 850,000 yen chunk of plastic and metal and said, "Your porn, Kozi, uses analog magnetic tape as a data medium. Particles on the tape are oriented in patterns that your VCR can read and decode. The VCR turns the decoded patterns into a signal that is identical to that of your pay-per-view cable channels, and your television uses this signal - regardless of where it originated - to recreate, dot by dot, the naked woman handcuffed to the bars of her cell while three cops take turns exploring her various orifices with whichever extremity appeals."
At that, Kozi scowled and said, "Dammit, Mana, you asked if you could play your video games while you took care of the cats, not invade my porn stash!"
Mana raised a langorous eyebrow. "Well, it was only fair; you were spending every night in a different strip club in Guam, adding dollars to g-strings with your teeth, while I spent every night fending off the unnatural fascination that Raka's teeth apparently have with my ears. Watching your porn was the most innocuous revenge that I could have taken by far." He smirked slightly at Kozi's indignant snort, and said, "The flaws of analog recording lie primarily in its susceptibility to noise and artifact transfer, as well as deterioration of signal strength and clarity as the tape ages. Copies that are made from the original tape will have a lower signal-to-noise ratio. In copies made from the copies, it will be lower still, as the noise inherent to each tape is added to the recording and the original signal becomes less distinct." He paused, assessing the present level of Kozi's inevitable decline into befuddlement. "You are not lost already, are you?"
Kozi's jaw was beginning to throb, and his eyes had gained a wild look as Mana began speaking in greater percentages of gibberish. "Not really, yet, but Mana... Japanese. Please. Not tech-ese." He threw a pleading look to the impassive closet geek in front of him.
"I cannot believe you sometimes," Mana snorted, but tilted his head in assent. "Tape equals unreliable, understand? But for now, it is what we have to work with. This camera does use tape. What makes it special is that it uses digital encoding, rather than analog, on that tape."
Kozi sighed. "Digital."
"Digital. Instead of exactly reproducing the signal as received by the lens, it samples that signal and converts each sample into a pattern of set highs and lows. Each part of the pattern is called a bit. There are extra bits included to check for corruption and errors, and in the case of such errors, to allow the decoding device to recreate at least some of the lost signal." Kozi's eyes had glazed over, Mana noted with a mix of exasperated despair and fondness. "Look, the point is that it's inconvenient to edit and copy analog tape and you get bad results anyway. With this, I can connect it to my computer and use various programs to do anything I want with the video, and any copies will be almost perfectly identical to the original. Does that work for you?"
Kozi perked up and said, "Why the fuck didn't you just say that to begin with?"
A low moan escaped as Mana lowered his head to rest on the dully shimmering video camera.
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Thanks for reading. ^_^