First Steps (Elena/Open)

[dan]

Danny didn't know if it was the fact that he grew up in the city, didn't like loud noises or just liked the idea of people owning their own homes, but he had to admit that he was enjoying his trip to the Odaiba suburbs even if it did turn out to be a total bust. Ever since he'd found the small blue device he now habitually carried in his pocket he'd been completely stumped as to what to do with the thing, but had decided to take the simple wait and see approach. Normally that worked well for him, but not in this case - after the disaster in the mall he'd been working at as a part time janitor it had become clear that he was only going to get more questions than answers if he simply sat and waited for something to happen as it had at the mall.

Granted, it had been refreshing to see that it functioned as more than a simple watch and that he'd been right to keep it, but the odd feeling of familiarity was making him impatient and uncomfortable, two sensations that were usually all but unknown to him. Danny had realized after that incident that he was in over his head - he didn't know enough information to act, and if he did fumble around blindly he was liable to put both himself and those around him in danger... or at least that was what he felt and knew to be true, although it was without basis or reason. More or less the realization stemmed from the same place that the feeling of familiarity did, like he was on the verge of remembering something that he'd forgotten, but either way he knew that going it alone was no longer an option - at the very least he needed the opinion of an electronics expert before he started digging any deeper. Once he had an idea of what the thing was, he'd be able to act from there.

It had been with that thought in mind that he'd put out a few feelers with his old business associates that happened to have connections within the academic community, and it had been from them that he'd heard the name Elena Stein - despite being only two years out of high school, the young woman had already amassed quite a reputation as an inventor for electronics and precision equipment, and on top of that had a reputation for trying to help people where possible. She also had a reputation for being short and somewhat spacey when talking to people, but at this point Danny didn't care - she would've been the easiest person to get a hold of, and likely the most knowledgable on he'd have access to. Once he'd found her name and where she worked and went to college it had been a relatively simple matter to find out where she lived - stopping for a moment and looking at the mailbox attached to a streetside wall that came up to chest height, Danny matched the number on the box with the one he'd been given. This was the place.

Looking to his side and up at the house, Danny merely stared for an minute or two as he admired the simplicity of the architecture before turning and walking up to the front of the house, pulling one of his hands out of his pockets and ringing the doorbell. While he'd tried to somewhat clean himself up, his yellow business shirt, blue overshirt and tie were still slightly messy as if he'd dressed quickly and without thought, although at the very least his clothes were clean. Pulling his hand away from the button on the wall and stepping back, Danny put his hand back into his pocket as he waited someone to answer the door.

[fenix]

“Mistress Stein, you have a visitor… Mistress Stein?”

Blurring shapes. A bright light above her – shifting and contorting before her eyes in almost rhythmic sequences.

“Mistress Stein?”

It took a few moments more before the shapes finally made sense to her – and it didn’t take much longer than that before she was batting the object away with her nearest arm before it could continue.

“I heard you Alice! Just… give me some space; you’re giving me a headache,” she finally managed – watching through still blurred eyes as the floating words she’d identified and shape’s she’d yet to identify moved away from her. Closing her eyes now that her virtual assistant wasn’t standing over her anymore; she allowed herself to exhale deeply in relief before forcing herself to sit up on the sofa she’d crashed out on – one of the few pieces of furniture she had in the building. The faded and dull green-leather finish had seen a lot of wear from use by her since she’d gotten her own house; most by electric light in the small hours of the mornings she’d spent working.

“Mistress Stein; there’s a visitor waiting outside,” prompted the compilation of words and shapes again, as the strings of information began to weave themselves together more rapidly.

“Well go let them in then; you don’t have to ask my permission to open the door every time someone knocks.”

“Very well.”

The now nearly fully formed girl bowed quickly and glided off – a word-created representation of herself from perhaps a year ago – to answer the door in her stead. Elena found herself sighing again as the hologram left – though it had been an experiment into artificial intelligence that had created Alice, it hadn’t really done anything on its own violation since she’d allowed it free control over the building. The project at that time had been put on hold for lack of actual advancement in the field – meaning that Alice wasn’t really meant to be active at all when it came to it – but sometimes… well, it was good to have an assistant to hand.

Despite all of her genius, she knew well enough that she couldn’t handle the inputs from several machines simultaneously and act on all of them as quickly as a machine program could.

“It can’t be helped…” she murmured – both referring to her current situation and to her choice to keep Alice active in the house.

She shifted her hair with a hand as she attempted to reach down the back of her own shirt – reaching for a small switch that, after a moment she heard shift before she stiffened visibly. It had been some time since she’d started making use of the results of Project Mobility – and still, the initial linking of her nervous system with the electrical systems lining her back and spider-webbing about her legs caused more than a tingle to run down her spine. The leggings flashed dimly in response to the electrical current being provided to them by that one switch – before fading again as the energy supply became more consistent.

It was then that the voice of her assistant rang clearly through her head, along with the rest of the house as it answered the door.

“Hello, and welcome to the residence of Mistress Stein. Please, make your way through to the main room; my Mistress will receive you there.”

Standing quickly at the thought of being joined any moment by whoever it was that had come to bother her; there were few thoughts running about her mind at that moment. One of the loudest at that moment was, most likely, ‘Why does she always refer to me like that?” It was closely followed by, ‘Why do I keep letting her refer to me like that anyway?’

[dan]

Resisting the urge to yawn as he continued to wait by the front door, Danny's eyes began to wander as he heard people inside of the house talking - not that unusual, but still somewhat surprising to him, and as relaxed as he was Danny did not generally like surprises. Sure, he tolerated them and merely dealt with them as they came, but he'd worked a wide enough variety of jobs over the years to learn that surprises were seldem of the good or pleasant kind, and as such generally were unwelcome. Surprises meant complications, complications usually meant more work or more time spent fixing or working around the problem, and more time spent on a job usually meant either an unhappy boss or client as well as possibly reduced pay. There were some jobs where more time spent working was welcome, but few people paid people like him by the hour anymore - most jobs these days were done with flat payments, and if something changed in the middle of the job, it was your problem.

..... the hell?

It was with this state of mind that Danny turned his attention back to the door when it opened, only to stare with a blank expression as something that clearly wasn't human stood with the door open, with only those two words passing through his head. Even more unnerving was that it vaguely resembled the woman he'd gone there to look for. Had Danny not been nearly as driven as he was to learn about the small object in his pocket he would had gone straight to the shoddy hotel room he'd rented out the night before, and still considered the idea for a moment before deciding it wasn't worth it. It had already cost him money coming here, and he'd cleared his entire day for this visit - if he went back now he'd had wasted time, money and effort, all with nothing to show for it, and he was not about to let the matter concerning the electronic device go.

Still, Danny remained standing where he was for several moments after the thing spoke, debating on whether or not to follow the.... well, he thought it was a machine, but it didn't seem to be solid... thing's instructions, or wait for an actual human. After several more seconds of silence Danny slowly glanced over to the number on the door, once again confirming it - he was at the right house, and he hadn't made any wrong turns. This was unmistakably Elena Stein's house. Letting out a slow breath, Danny simply shrugged to himself and stepped through the doorway after a moment, making sure he had the thing that had opened the door in his sight at all times. Normally he had no problem with things most people considered strange, but this was the exception - the glowing person, for lack of a better word, resembled Elena Stein's photo too much for Danny to feel comfortable around it. As he followed the thing into another room he saw the person he'd come to visit, and nodded once in a respectful manner.

"Sorry for crashing in like this uninvited, but I have something I'd like to get looked at, and after asking around I was told you'd be the best person to bring it to." Danny said, cutting right to the point. He knew full well that he was more or less intruding by the simple act of visiting the house uninvited and unscheduled without even having made the effort to call ahead, but for the first time in his life he was in something of a rush. He wanted to find out what he had in his pocket, and had enough manners that even without the slightly off putting glowing replica of Elena he felt uncomfortable being in someone else's house without any prior warning.

[fenix]

She could guess what this was leading up to. People weren’t directed to her unless other people in the field honestly had no clue what they were looking at – it had become a matter of pride for many other scientists since she’d arrived on the scene. Nobody wanted to ask for the help of a ‘little girl’ when it came to technology – especially if the findings were considered news worthy in any way, shape or form. She’d been told at least once before that her ego had inflated far too greatly for her accomplishments – that the goals she set for herself were far out of her own reach. Hadn’t that been how it had all started though? A little girl with her once impossible dreams - setting out to try and make her life great again?

She’d never planned for it to snowball quite so badly though.

“…Let me guess,” she started; picking up her book from the low coffee table set out in front of the sofa she’d roused herself from moments ago. She recognized the spine of the book quickly enough – and wondered for a moment how she’d fallen asleep reading it – before she diverted herself again to the task at hand.

“You’ve hear to ask about a small device, about a third of a foot long. With a small screen and some buttons set on one side of it.”

She sighed lightly and patted the spine of the book in thought – thinking for a moment as to which shelf the book could have originally come from. It was becoming more and more difficult to keep track of where all her books went now a days. The library just seemed to be growing larger and larger – and having all the shelving out of sight made telling difficult for her. Her A.I would probably have an idea where it all went – but she didn’t really want to ask it for help with the other person here. It was bad enough being constantly referred to as Mistress in the privacy of her own home – to have to deal with it while company was about was just a nightmare. …Though, she did need the A.I’s help for something else anyway.

“Alice – retrieve all the data currently on file in regards to the Stein’s Gate project and feed it through to the main interface… and find out where this book goes in the library.”

“Yes, Mistress. The information will be ready in a moment for your working pleasure.” The word-constructed Elena look-alike curtsied deeply, before dispersing back into random strings of data and disappearing. Now somewhat relieved to have the A.I out of the room and doing work – and therefore not doing anything to embarrass her further – she turned back to her visitor again and patted the book in her hand again.

“So, is there anything else your after, or have I just about got everything?"

[dan]

Her initial guesses had been impressive to say the least... or they would have been if one wasn't paying attention. What Elena had just described could have fit any number of electronics in this day and age, and the first thing Danny knew was to avoid vagueness when possible, as it was usually the mark of con men and people in similar professions. Had Elena not come as highly recommended as she was and had the history to back up her talk, Danny would have again been tempted to leave again, there and then. He'd come this far, though, so he might as well finish the errand and be done with the ordeal - with any luck he'd actually get some useful information this time.

"Yes and no. It's not that big, and everything is on the front. I've spent hours looking at the thing and there's nothing on the sides or back of it." Danny said, as succinct and to the point as possible. As soon as he spoke Danny realized that he may have sounded rude, despite the relaxed tone he used - he certainly hadn't intended to be such, and had to remind himself again that Elena wasn't the kind of person he was used to dealing with, which was to say that she wasn't some employer who was impatient to get a job over and done with, someone who had no need for pleasantries. Stifling the urge to stretch, Danny's attention was once again drawn to the Elena look alike as the real person spoke to it, again creeped out slightly by the likeness of it to its creator, and Danny momentarily wondered if said likeness had been intentionally done on Elena's part. As his eyes calmly followed the glowing person out of the room, Danny's attention was suddenly brought back to Elena as she spoke to him again.

"No, the electronic was more or less the reason I came here. I've spent hours messing with the thing, but so far it doesn't seem to respond to anything you do to it." Danny replied, lazily pulling his right hand out of its pocket and holding up the small watch sized device in plain sight so that Elena could see it. While fairly similar to her description, it was only three inches wide at the most, and only had three noticable controls on it's blue surface - one button on the right side of the small screen in the center, and two more to the left.