Fortuna Verto

28-Logistical Exchange

It wasn't long after that Rosa and Tristine finally arrived at a section visibly more metal than stone, the place a massive structure within an expansive chamber of the stone. Passing through the reinforced door, the two were finally at the generator station, their overall destination.

It was also becoming clear that this place was actually really cold. Rosa was very thankful that her protection from the cold was still running strong, but it was getting so intense that she could still feel the chill regardless. It didn't help that sheets of ice were visibly coating everything everywhere, things just looked really cold. Tristine was already shivering, even her own conduit nature was having a few struggles keeping up in this cold. Even so, it didn't seem like her own weaknesses were slowing Tristine down, she ran quickly over to the controls and checked to see what needed to be done to get everything operational once again. Rosa meanwhile was at a total loss, feeling very out of place. Why was she even here, again? Tristine worked on the main control unit for a while, getting no response. After a while, she figured out what the problem actually was though. Beyond a few system lockups after so much disuse, the entire thing really was just too frozen to start. She looked around for the central core, a prime location to get moving to get some heat pumping in the place. Eventually she found it, in a level far above them.. with no access remaining to climb up with.

"Rosa, do you see anything we can climb up here with? Going to need to restart the central core up there." "Ice, ice, more ice. Not much else. Oh, but couldn't we use some holos?" "I don't happen to have anything like that handy, though I remember you brought something like that. Could you give me a hand climbing up?" Tristine waited for Rosa to construct a sort of ladder for her, but unfortunately Rosa found herself unable to generate a ladder more than a few meters high. Their destination however was a good 30 meters above them. If Tristine was generating her own holos, such a thing wouldn't be a problem anymore. It wasn't even as if Rosa could just pass off her own kit, such a thing was sort of wired to her brain now.. even depending on cybernetics. Tristine however simply stared at Rosa, as if the solution was all too obvious.

"Okay, just let me know when you get up there and I'll see what I can do to help you from down here." "Wait, what? Me? But I really don't know this stuff at all." "You mean, always in the past, you had to get tips from Kori and then did it yourself. Like I said, I'll be here if you need any tips. I'll probably just be chipping ice off the console while you're gone anyway. Don't forget, we're in a hurry, don't spend too long thinking about it." Tristine left Rosa to simply stand there stuttering, moving instead to tend to the ice layer problem on the console previously mentioned. Rosa was still very uncertain about this idea, but no one was leaving her with any alternatives. Still muttering concerns under her breath, Rosa wove a ladder for her to climb, creating the thing as she went up. At the top, she took a break against the black stone of the wall, looking upon the spherical form of the core before her. Much like everything below, this too was covered in ice. Before the sphere was a dashboard designed for manual operation, and as such it was full of physical controls. However, most of the controls too were frozen. She could work to free particular controls.. as long as she knew which controls she needed access to.

"So, it has some weird controls, what am I looking for?" "I'm not certain what sort of layout such an old model is using, but there should be some controls for manual ignition. Look across the labels for anything that seems pretty close to that." "What.. exactly would it look like?" "Again, the order of controls would depend on the model, the only thing that would make what you need stand out is the label it was given." Rosa knew Tristine was overestimating her abilities, but hadn't expected quite the reason she would end up having her first problems. Reading.. the exact thing she hadn't put much attention into, she had no way to figure out what any of the labels actually implied. Sure, it did mean she could always spend the effort to get all of the stuff unfrozen.. but then what if she touched the wrong thing? This.. simply implied the safe solution wasn't her choice. She turned her attention instead to the core itself, generally coated with ice too. These controls were here to manually put stuff inside the core into action, something which would be dangerous to do for a person because close proximity could lead to serious injury. Fortunately, she had the tools to work on such a thing from a bit farther away than conventionally possible.