Stuff

“Um, Olivia-”

“What the fuck is wrong with your pistons.” The not-a-question, more-of-a-declaration-of-something is directed at the inventor with the misfortune of having been recruited by Jesse for this little venture, and Jesse winces as Andrew’s voice rises to match Olivia’s.

“My pistons are fine, why the fuck are yours so loud?”

Bad idea. The last time Olivia was this mad, Aiden had sabotaged something and had to flee from a wrench flying squarely at where his forehead had been. It’s been ages, honestly, and Jesse would like to sink into the nostalgia, but Olivia’ll probably commit inter-world murder if she gets distracted now.

“Hey, hey, Andy- Olivia- can’t we talk this over?”

“We’re talking!” Having the joint fury of two capable inventors focused on her is scarier than half the monsters Jesse’s fought.

“…at a slightly quieter volume?” Or with nicer words, that works too.

Olivia sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose, and Jesse feels bad for dragging her out of Redstonia for this.

“Jesse, you don’t get it. This is obscene.”

For pretty much as long as Jesse’s known Olivia, Olivia almost always prefers snark and subtlety to outright confrontation, but her work is in a league of its own and dear to her heart. Even when she figured they’d never be more than nobodies, Olivia’s always been passionate about redstone work.

“I- okay, you’re right, I don’t get it.” She’d wondered, briefly, if these two wouldn’t get along great, but she’d figured it would be over differences in design, or automation- not this. “It’s a lot quieter now, right? Isn’t that a plus?”

It is, apparently, not!

“I didn’t almost go deaf for nothing, Jesse!” Olivia smacks the lever in front of her, activating the piston she happened to have on hand (always handy for repairs) and making Andrew cover his ears. “This sound is essential to a piston! If I have to wear ear protection for a reasonable sound, so be it!”

Her fellow inventor, shaping-up-to-be-dead-rvial disagrees.

“You’re insane!”

Jesse’s attempts aren’t working, and she can’t rely on Olivia’s other oldest friend, since Axel’s in the spawner chamber throwing himself at mushroomed skeletons and -personified cyclones?- -the wind itself?- a challenge too good for griefers to pass up on, apparently.

Good battle experience, at least.

Lukas speaks up, the hero to Jesse's rescue, except he sounds only passingly interested, far more focused on the devices lined up in front of him, and suddenly this feels a lot more like adding fuel to the fire than rescuing anybody.

“I dunno, Olivia, don’t these crafters balance it out? We could get so many supplies ready; it’s the sort of thing Beacontown’s builders will go nuts over.”

“As soon as I fix how they sound.” The crafters themselves don’t seem to be much of a problem for Olivia, whose eyes had lit up an eternity-also-known-as-fifteen-minutes-ago at their suggestion, but the pistons part of the elaborate assembly line had offended her on a personal level as soon as Andy demoed the system for them.

“Suit yourself." Lukas shrugs, not even looking over. "Bye, Andrew, it was nice meeting you.”

Petra’s contribution is about as helpful, except it’s not meant to be and is also worse, and Jesse gets a sinking feeling as Petra hefts her new toy.

“Hey, you don’t need to reengineer the weapons, right?”

“Knock yourself out.”

Petra proceeds to absolutely wreck the copper side-wall of the lab, dark metal of the mace shining against the duller green. The sound rings out, strikingly unique and as impressive as anything Petra does. Visually, besides being super destructive, the contrasting colors mirror how her weapon looked shattering green, boggy bones, when she’d been fighting alongside Axel before following them to this room.

Lukas is less impressed, glancing over from the line of crafters to give her the look. (Reserved for griefers who fall on him, usually.)

“Really, Petra?”

Riding the adrenaline high of battle, maybe, or just seeing how this is heading down a dangerous path anyway, Petra shrugs, smirk on the verge of a grin as her shoulder rests against the reddish part of the wall.

“He can replace it with the red kind, it’s cooler.”

“It’ll just keep oxidizing.”

Not for Petra to worry about, based on her shrug, and Jesse’s overwhelming fondness for her friends wars with her absolute exasperation at this shitshow.

“Better keep on top of it, then.”

Andrew takes the wrecking of his wall as well as any engineer would, honestly, by focusing on how it relates to his livelihood. His dramatic finger-pointing at Olivia might be earned, because this group is a disaster, but Petra’s the one with her fingers wrapped around the mace handle, eyeing his skull and it’s just generally not helping- and Jesse’s exasperated with him too.

“So that’s your play, huh? Have your warrior smash up my workshop?”

“Not a bad idea.”

All this over how a piston sounds.

Still.

She’s known Olivia for ages, and just because it doesn’t bother Jesse enough doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be an affront to everything Olivia works with and for. Jesse wishes Harper’d had the free time to come with, instead of hunting down project parts elsewhere in the portal network, but then she considers how intense two inventors are and considers herself lucky she didn’t make it three.

Andy scoffs at the threat.

“Please, that won’t work on any of my machines-”

Olivia steps forward and, yup, there’s the wrench, steadily being smacked against her palm as a substitute for where she’d obviously like to aim it.

“Then there’s a certain griefer who can help me re-engineer their insides.”

While Axel might be too lost to chaos and the thrill of destruction for Jesse to recruit him for calming Olivia down, Jesse has absolutely no doubt Olivia could redirect him to griefing the lab, especially not when Petra’s already made the first strike and Andy’s been insulting Olivia right back.

Ah, she loves her friends.

They aren’t helping, unfortunately, and Jesse’d better brainstorm up a way to smooth things over before Andy’s head is as dented as the wall.

She’s not seeing many options.

Lukas has apparently judged this whole thing as a step below wrestling with an ocelot, in term of dangerous stunts he’s not even going to bother considering, Petra looks ready for her new mace to see some more exciting action, Axel’s Axel, and-

Well, Radar and Ivor are pretty good at bringing things to reason, through stuttered platitudes and stern scowls respectively, but they’re both too busy marveling over a vial of something ominous, inky tendrils licking at the inside of the glass and two red eyes staring back out at them.

(She also spies the new bulge in the top of Ivor’s satchel, leather pushed up by at least four new potion bottles, because of course he had to snatch those. It looks like he’s repurposed Radar’s bag for smuggling samples out, too. If this gets ugly, properly, she has a feeling Ivor will be more than happy to jump in and see firsthand what they do in close quarters.)

It shouldn’t have to come to blows, or explosives, or them getting banned from a cool world with weird pistons, but that’s what Jesse gets for not thinking this through.