Chapter Text
"We’re live in five, people! Chop chop, take your marks!"
"What marks? This is literally just a video of us printing something. We don’t exactly have a script to follow. And we aren’t livestreaming, either."
"C’mon, Em, just play along. Just… get ready for when the recording starts?"
"Actually, I started recording before you started bickering. Just go whenever."
A pause.
"...can you edit this out?"
"Nah, leave it in, this is comedy gold."
It’s actually Peony who comes up with the idea of making it a whole project, but really, it was a group effort.
It started as many dumb and/or exciting plans did: with JJ walking up and saying, "Wouldn’t it be neat if…" This sentence had ended in many different ways in the past, ranging from "...I climbed the weather tower?" (which is why JJ’s left femur had to be partially regrown), to "...we tried to ferment some of those weird pinkish berries?" (which Peony was convinced would lead to them all getting methanol poisoning, but actually just made really weird tasting alcohol that was significantly stronger than they were expecting), to "...we made out in the cargo unloading bay where nobody’ll notice us? Like, right now?" (they did, and it was, in fact, very neat). In this instance, JJ walked up while everybody else was eating, and said, "Wouldn’t it be neat if we could do something about the phants so they wouldn’t bug us so much?”"
Em looked up from their nondescript, automatically extruded food patty, and raised an eyebrow. "What, like, some organized system of small towers ringing all around the settlement, along with some surrounding land, which would each work to repel phants away from occupied areas and prevent them from rampaging or eating crops, and easily extendable enough that the radius could be reasonably expanded simply by printing off more towers and placing them down, and with a low enough power drain that it’s almost negligible?"
"Oh, just shut up, Em. I know the fence works well enough, but I still keep having to shoo phants away from the cornfields, even if it’s not a huge deal. Plus, the fence smells like shit."
"The fence has to smell like shit, that’s why it works!"
Jan clears his throat, effectively breaking up the brewing argument. Then he clears it again, and there’s a pause as both JJ and Em realize he hadn’t actually been getting their attention, he’d just swallowed some of his rice wrong. In the awkward silence, because someone had to say something, Jan asks, "So what was your idea, JJ?"
JJ shoots him a blinding grin. "What iffffff…" they drag out the syllable to build up attention, "we had a mech?"
"What if we had a mech, JJ?" Jan sputters incredulously. "What if we had a billion manna too? How do you expect us to get a mech?"
"Or pilot one?" Em adds.
JJ’s moved on to finger guns now. "Well, I mean, we print it. Not all at once, because there’s no way in hell I’m getting anywhere near enough time on the main printer-"
"Not after that time with the mangrove," Peony interjects, before turning back to her food.
"- but we should be able to just print out one piece of it at a time, and then put them together by hand, right?"
Em pauses. "Well, I mean. We’d have to still actually get a license. And assembling it isn’t going to be that easy. And we’d need to find someone to pilot it. But we would be able to print the parts for it, I guess."
The group collectively takes a moment to ponder this, and then the conversation moves on and the whole idea gets sort of mentally filed in the "JJ’s impractical ideas" folder and they almost forget about it until four days later, when they’re all hanging out and Peony abruptly says, "We could totally build it."
"Build what," Em asks, "dry socks?"
"No, I mean, we could totally build the mech. It’d be a pain in our collective asses, but we could absolutely do it."
JJ’s face lights up. Jan just looks at Peony in confusion. "Aren’t you supposed to be the voice of reason around here?" he asks her.
Peony sits down and pulls out a slate. "It’s your turn as voice of reason today. Didn’t you get the timesheet?" she asks, before pulling up a wall of text. "Anyway, it turns out that there’s a lot you can get done without a license. Really old stuff that was forced into public domain, official emergency repairs for GMS parts or such that get used for everything so it was just blasted out publicly, ‘rented’ licenses for individual parts with no restrictions on copying just the raw blueprint data, and a few laws that mean that in some, specific cases, if you scan the part yourself, you’re allowed to use that scan. It wouldn’t be easy, but we could totally do it."
"And the pilot?" Em asks. "You planning to print off one of those, too?"
"Don’t act like you aren't as excited as the rest of us at the chance to pilot a mech," JJ says. Em pauses, then sighs, resigned. JJ’s smile gets wider, somehow, impossibly, and suddenly a random idea has become an actual thing.
They aren’t committed at first. Jan’s started taking a few 3D pictures of his brother’s civilian hardsuit, and Em’s next infodump is about cold fusion reactors and power distribution, but nothing serious happens. Nothing gets printed, nobody’s made any models or started piecing bits together; it’s all still in the realm of theory. They have plausible deniability, at least to themselves.
Then Em finds the camera drone in their attic, and suddenly, the group knows they’re fucked.
The first video is about as amateur as possible. Even with the camera drone doing its absolute best to keep people in focus, JJ’s enthusiastic gesturing leaves it a bit confused, and more than once when they try to point out what the printer’s doing, it simply remains focused on whoever was most recently talking. Peony’s too quiet, JJ’s too loud, and Em keeps accidentally speaking into the printer instead of towards the drone. They made the twin poor decisions of starting the video early enough to show the print start, and attempting to do the whole thing in a single take, so there’s a lot of rambling to fill the dead air as the portable printer works. The video ends with JJ reaching for the joint to hold it up, and almost burning their hand ("In my defense," they say while shaking their hand up and down to try to cool it off, "I’m used to polymer stuff being printed, not metal stuff, and that comes out at a way lower temperature.") It is, in short, a mess.
Within a few hours, it’s broken a million views. By the end of the day, it’s closing on two.