75 Godiva, Friday

[vdistinctive]

So. Hardison and Parker were officially going to be moving in. The first rush of "yes, please, be where I can keep an eye on you and make sure you're not turning into creepy zombie versions (or alien bug versions, or any other kind of creepy versions) of yourselves" had worn off, and Eliot was starting to realize what that actually meant, logistically. The house couldn't just be his place, anymore. He had to make sure that they had the space to make it their own, too. It wasn't as if Eliot's house was small, but, well. He'd been living there for coming up on three years now. It had stuff in it.

So today, Eliot was cleaning house. He'd cleared out the dining room (never used, they always ate in the kitchen, so that'd be great as, like, an office or study or something) and was now tackling the basement.

Which would be how a box full of bear traps ended up on his front stoop.

He had no idea what he was going to do with those.

[open!]

Comments

[vdistinctive]

"Not for most things," Eliot said. "We're big fans of digital in my world. Digital means it can connect to the internet, and we're real big fans of that."

Eliot, on the other hand, clearly wasn't entirely sold. He was an old soul. Or to put it less politely, kind of a luddite.

[uncertain_dume]

"Yeah, we have our HoloNet back home," Kanan noted. "Same idea, bigger scale. Way more cat pictures, mostly."

No, it was not all cat pictures.

"It has its uses too, but I try not to have much of a presence there myself, for the usual reasons."

[vdistinctive]

Eliot nodded. "You shoulda seen me tryin' to convince Hardison that gettin' my face all over the 'net was a bad idea." Admittedly, they possibly should have seen that coming, when they set Eliot up as the fiddle in the con.

[uncertain_dume]

"Space, on a planet this small? Was it ten or fifteen minutes before somebody recognized you?"

Kanan was also working on grasping things like Earth's scale. It was a work in progress.

[vdistinctive]

"You know Earth is a lot bigger'n this island, right?"

[uncertain_dume]

"Yeah," Kanan replied, "and it's a lot smaller than a galaxy, and unless I've missed my mark entirely, you've got at least a few people out there who aren't necessarily happy with you. Or is access to the internet not actually as common on Earth as I've been led to believe?"

He grew up on a city planet. He was also working on grasping just how diverse everything on Earth really was.

[vdistinctive]

"Pretty sure the Russian mob ain't spendin' all its time on YouTube," Eliot said. "So, yeah, it'd take 'em a little longer'n that to find out. Have you actually gone out and seen any of this planet?"

[uncertain_dume]

"Only the parts with food," Kanan admitted, shrugging. "Doctor Lecter had a sort of world tour class through the Community Center, focused around food. So I've tasted fish from all around the world, more or less."

Lots of cultures had a hard focus on seafood. Who knew?

[vdistinctive]

"And you didn't happen to notice that the place is made up of all different cultures with all different approaches to tech?"

When 71% of your planet was covered in water, fish got to be a big commodity.

[uncertain_dume]

"It was a class on cuisine. The grand sum total of all the tech I saw along the way mostly consisted of ovens and deep fryers," Kanan pointed out. "We have literally billions of variations of those around our galaxy, but most places still have HoloNet access anyway."

[vdistinctive]

Eliot was pretty sure he would have noticed. Of course, Eliot was also a) a native of Earth and b) naturally paranoid enough that it took three weeks and a series of bear traps for his best friends to notice he'd gone nuts.

"The internet ain't entirely proliferated yet," he explained. "Some places can't afford it. Some are culturally just not that into it. And some places have it restricted or even banned by the government." Eliot smirked faintly. "My point bein', the Earth's still a little too big and diverse for findin' me to only take someone fifteen minutes."

[uncertain_dume]

"Someday this planet is going to start making sense to me," Kanan said, after a moment's pause. "Someday. And when that day comes, I'll know for a fact I've been here too long."

As if he didn't already think that. Honestly.

"Most of the technologies I'm used to, we've had for thousands of years. I've never really seen much in the way of an entire world working on figuring out what to do with its own equivalents. It's as fascinating as it is confusing."

[vdistinctive]

"Y'all haven't advanced technologically for millenia?" Well, at least some of the culture shock went both ways. "Good lord."

[uncertain_dume]

"There have been improvements on what we've got," Kanan replied, shrugging. "But there isn't much around nowadays that wasn't around in some fashion back in the days of the Old Republic. I guess we have bacta now. That's a step up from kolto?"

Sure, that meant a whole lot on Earth, Kanan.

[vdistinctive]

"Yeah, there're kids back home who don't even recognize the state of the art stuff from my childhood. Can't imagine still usin' the tech from a thousand years ago."

[uncertain_dume]

"I guess there isn't really anywhere to go after mastering interplanetary travel and a galaxy wide shared information Network," Kanan mused. "At least you guys have figured out artificial intelligence, right? That's a start."

... He was assuming, because Hal.

[vdistinctive]

Eliot was pretty sure they'd just gotten complacent aftermaking those things.

"You mean like the one that tried to myrder us all? Yeah. We got that real well in hand."

[uncertain_dume]

"So it's a work in progress," Kanan mused. "That's what restraining bolts are for. Or the safety protocols in the Danger Shop, anyway."

It... kind of sounded like he was trying to make Eliot feel better about how his class had almost gotten everyone killed.

Because he was. It wasn't your fault Earth's AI was glitchy in homicidal ways. Really.

[vdistinctive]

Honestly, Eliot had still been messed up enough from the hellish Fandom trip that he hadn't even gotten around to blaming himself for Hal, yet.

Yet.

"The hell is a restraining bolt supposed to do to a formless computer program?"

[uncertain_dume]

"Typically, they restrict a droid from doing anything its master didn't explicitly tell it to do," Kanan explained. "Which would probably extend to control over the holo-capablities in the Danger Shop. But I always found them in bad taste, honestly. For something like Hal, something that's openly homicidal, I might make an exception, but they are sentient. Wouldn't feel right making anybody into a puppet like that."

A beat.

"Which I suppose is what we were doing in the first place. Why the hell do we have a sentient training room program, anyway?"

[vdistinctive]

Eliot shook his head. "As far as I knew we didn't. Apparently that thing was some kind of -- artifact or somethin'. Just kinda sittin' off in its own part of the hard drive until I accidentally woke it up."

Eliot barely understood his world's basic computer programs. He had no idea what to think about an AI.

[uncertain_dume]

"So we weren't using Hal, we were just using the system that Hal was being housed on," Kanan surmised, frowning faintly. "And that other one. Alright, that's... better."

He was pretty sure it was better, anyway. He'd never really encountered much in the way of AI systems that weren't housed inside their own droid bodies.

"It brings me right back to 'this place is weird,' though."

[vdistinctive]

"Yeah, there ain't anybody here who'll argue with that," Eliot said. "Tell ya what, though, ain't no way I'm using that shop again any time soon."

Hardison assured him that the AIs were both perfectly well locked away and that even Eliot's stumbling around in the programs wouldn't let them back out. Eliot was still perfectly happy to be teaching something next semester he could house in a normal classroom.

Even if it did mean learning how to knit.

[uncertain_dume]

"And that would make two of us," Kanan agreed, giving his head a shake. "Not that I used the Danger Shop much in the first place, but I'll definitely be thinking twice before throwing my students at a rancor any time soon."

Kanan. Kanan. It was a rancor. THINK TWICE ANYWAY.

[vdistinctive]

"Man, I don't even know what a rancor is and I can tell throwin' your students at one is a bad idea." Really now. "What're you teachin' this time around?"