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thatsadorbsyo · 4 years

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Lucas - Ache (15)

(cw: brief mention of off-screen character death. depictions of dissociation. this post references the events of Unity and Borne Upon Our Hands, two of the finale quests in the #FFXIVHeartless campaign, and contains spoilers for the quest logs.)

The second step to recovery is creation. I have defiled and perverted my own hands with a brief but tremulous appetite for destruction, and they can’t be healed merely by the bandages that hide my cuts and scrapes. I have to make something; I gotta restore their purpose. But I won’t allow my first personal project to be a machina of war or a ward of containment.

No. I’m gonna make something whimsical, even if it fucking kills me.

I rented a workbench at the goldsmiths’ guild for the afternoon, and it’s this rickety thing that wobbles just enough to be noticeable every time I shift my weight. Wandering engineers can’t be choosers; it’ll have to do. Plates of metal shavings and ingots sit off to my left -- copper, bronze, iron -- mirrored by an array of delicate tools on my right -- anvil, calipers, pliers -- that I’ve pulled out of my new toolbox.

Oh, that’s a neat little thing, have I mentioned it? The garnet set into its gear-shaped latch is enough to draw a curious eye from the lalafell plinking away on the next desk over; a covetous look if I ever fucking saw one. I pull it closer to me, protective, and pull out of it the few spare tools of my own that I managed to bring back from the Voyage: a bench hammer, needle files, engravers.

Inside my rosewood toolbox is a smaller box full of clockwork gears that I salvaged from an old Gelmorran chronometer that I got from a man named Tomi in Gridania, what feels like a lifetime ago. I needed a couple of cogs to repair a music box, but I knew the scrap parts would come in handy someday, so I’ve kept them with me all this time.

A toy, maybe. I could make a--

A battle surges below you on a small strip of land between the Salemtaza’s Voyage and the White Celsius, but you are not part of it. A shuttle flies you high overhead, distant from the din of clashing forces, and once again you find yourself gestating a pit of dread in your heart as you cross a great wall for the second time in your life: This time, it’s Blackburn’s Wall. Its bulkhead is dotted with magiteknical interstices and turrets near the top for artillery. Patchwork in design, but clearly taking inspiration from--

No. No, I won’t go back there.

Focus, Nevin. Unfuck yourself.

I don’t realize my hands are balled up into shaking fights, knuckles going light where they rest against the smooth wood of the workbench, until the lalafell fellow next to me clears his throat in a pointed gesture. He’s staring at me with a wary sort of suspicion, like he fears I might spontaneously start blowing scalding steam out of my ears. How long was I out?

Is he right to be afraid of me?

Breathe, Specialist. Toys. What do I know about toys? Think about something else.

Okay, how about this: The first time I met Voldo Blackburn, he was cradling a delicate little wind-up jumping beetle that Ainu had brought to the engineering bay for repairs. Voldo didn’t know any of us and had no reason to engage with us, considering the fact that we jailed him the moment he joined our ship, but he still opened that little guy right up -- with tools swiped from my own goddamn belt, no less -- and triaged its guts without even asking Ainu to explain how she’d so clumsily broken it.

His hands worked with the deft care that I came to know when we--

In transit from the Celsius’s stomach to her head, you first must pass through her heart. It has been wounded -- punctured, a massive blast torn through her side by a burst of levin that still crackles along the edges of the hull -- and bleeds yet more levin and aether from the pipes that course through the walls. A door stands between you and the control room, locked by an interface.

There’s a space for a key, a circular spiral opening set into the panel that blinks up at you with mocking impatience. Input. Input. Input.

On the screen is a riddle, the only thing other than engineering that you’ve shown any fucking proficiency at during this expedition.

[ SUPPLIED PASSWORD HINT: "I carry my home with me. I'm always traveling, but never lost. What am I?" ]

--when we... when... when we--

I inhale, sharp. Please stop. Please, please stop.

The clenching originates in my chest, not my stomach, and somehow this means I’m making progress. This isn’t nausea. This is heartache.

The last time I saw Voldo Blackburn, he was seeing Scylla off in the mobile tank we had crafted for her together, a shared labor that saw us working long, close hours in the final days of his life. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we were friends, but there was a synergy, which itself is a type of intimacy. We made something.

I need to make something.

The spark of creation doesn’t announce itself, it just hits me like a ball-peen hammer -- a blessing from Byregot him-fucking-self -- and I immediately set to sketching the idea to paper. A wind-up machina, like the ones from our adolescence that Voldo and I joked about emulating in Scylla’s all-terrain vehicle, but fanciful, like the beetle. Playful. I draw a set of wheels hidden by a series of iron bars oscillating in sinuous parallel, made to collectively appear as a single undulating muscle when they move in tandem. A spiral shell of hammered bronze on a servomotor that makes it rise and fall as the whole contraption moves forward on its slow ride to nowhere.

A little clockwork snail. That’s simple enough. Shit, fuck, I could make that in a couple of days. My relieved laughter must sound maniacal; I am the maddest little novice goldsmith aggressively dissociating in public while a shitty man watches on in judgement, but I don’t care. Who gives a shit. Some muscle deep inside me unclenches, a release of tension. An ache resolved.

Finally, I have something I feel like I can do.

Maybe I’ll give it to Cheche.

#ffxivwrite2020 #ffxivheartless #i told you i'd write something brighter #i promised and i did it #and nobody can criticize me #its too late at night so im not gonna edit this #it feels less literary than my usual writing but i dont care #lucas is Going Thru It #he doesnt have to be clever all the time #in fact he probably cant be all that clever right now #mmmMMMMM not editing this ok goodnight #IC post #lucas nevin #voldo blackburn #;_;#thank you meishali................

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vaanibct · 6 years

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Studio III

Week 14 (June 11-16)

This week’s Update…

A list of “Good” things that happened:

Every day this week, we had spent all of our Studio time on painting the cubes. At first, I didn’t realise that painting would take up this amount of time, however, we were wrong. On Friday, we finally finished all of the painting process, and setup up all the cubes. Due to the time limit, I thought that we WOULD be and NEEDED to be finished everything by Monday, so we could deal with unexpected issues during the week, but now, I have no extra time to solve our problems, and it seems like we may not finish to the best of our abilities.

On Wednesday, Daniel and Kelsea came in with our Dyslexi-AR board. This is the base of our project, because it includes space for all the images cubes, the endings, and the letter cube, as well as displaying Instructions for use. The board was laser printed and laser engraves, which resulted in clean and smooth wood. I thought that board looked amazing and I was very happy with it, however, I didn’t have any input for it. Daniel and Kelsea made the decisions themselves. Now, the only thing left was to sand it a little, and paint the parts to label where each block sets. So, Daniel took up this job and completed painting on Friday as well.

Due to the way Vuforia works, I needed to take the images of the “targets” for the software to detect. So, I needed all of the cubes finished (including 3 images cubes and 1 letters cube), as well as the endings, and the board. This is because the word order needs to be perfect for Vuforia to show the AR part. And after finishing everything else on Friday, I had the chance to take pictures to import it on to Vuforia. For this, Daniel helped me put all of the blocks in the correct order, so I could photograph the sequence on my phone. As soon as we finished the box, we delivered it to Kelsea, who was on ‘hinges’ duty.

On Saturday, Kelsea had finished connecting the box using clear and strong cello tape, in order to heat gun it, so that it would become like a clear plastic shine. She came in to studio to drop them off, so that we could finish our final setup.

A list of “Bad” things that happened:

Since this is the last week before Submission on Monday, I am freaking out. Personally, I am feeling nervous about the overall project, and if it will work or not. I have been spending hours on Unity - Vuforia, in order to problem solve and look for ways for the camera to detect the target image, and then play the sound. However, it has not been an easy ride. I have probably watched 20 youtube tutorials and read over 10 websites, without finding the solution. This has been the lowlight of my overall experience of the Project, because doing the AR was my task, and I feel like I have let my team down immensely. I think that it will be “touch and go,” because it’s Sunday afternoon and I still haven’t solved the issue. I am looking at ways to change the code (C# script) and for it to detect the target images, however I have had to restart several times. Over the course of 3 days, I have restarted 4 times and spend hours trying to name each layer correctly, and adding the correct video to each target image. One of the biggest issues I faced was that I downloaded several different assets into a project, and that completely crashed it. So, I moved on and re-did the whole process, this time, sticking to the basics and following the guide. However, this is not as simple as it seems, because I have to import the photos to Vuforia each time, and down the databases, as well as set it up using appropriate layers and layer names. It is very time consuming.

In terms of setting up, we finally claimed our spot on Thursday afternoon, which I think was a bit late. But, I pressured my team into arranging everything properly because I was getting extremely worried about not receiving a good spot, and also about leaving the set up to the last minute. This is because I really wanted to connect the TV with the laptop and position the table in its place, so that I could start testing the AR bit, as I need to ensure that the WebCam has enough distance from the table, for it to detect the Dyslexi-AR board.

At the moment, I think our set up looks average. In order to improve out foot traffic on the night of the Open Studio, I was hoping that we would have a Poster, a title, and a “classroom” like environment so that it relates to our theme. However, due to the time constraint, we were unable to discuss this further. Nonetheless, I designed the letters to be printed today, and printed them out in order to stick it at the top of our wall. This would definitely attract attention and also make our corner look a little more appealing.

To top all of this off, I was unable to open Vuforia in the P-Labs, which we are using for the set up. Even though we were able to install Unity to the laptop, I needed to download more assets in oder for the Vuforia part of the Software to start. I asked Daniel to set up the software for me on Friday, since I was busy setting up the project in my laptop. He said that Unity was installed and left it at that, which cause this huge problem. When I came in to Studio to work on Saturday, I realised that I couldn’t set up because the P-Labs wouldn’t allow me to run Vuforia. It asked for the username and password of the admin, which apparently is AUTUNI, and needs one of the lecturers to sign in. So, this made me even more scared and crazy, because now, our set up isn’t complete, our AR part is not working and we are unable to meet up to resolve these issues.

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#StudioIII #ctec607 #Dyslexia #PostHuman #BCT #AUT

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