Office Hours, Tuesday All Day

[on_her_korhal]

Kerrigan had coffee and painkillers.

She also had a lot of wiring and was probably located under the desk fiddling with the computer for most of the day. Hey, you never knew when it was going to come in handy to get things a little more... up to date.

Especially with those students around.

[ open hours open hours happy hours ]

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[the_merriest]

Rikku leaned into the office, intrigued by the wires and bolts. "Whoa. Are you fixing that machina?"

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

Kerrigan paused behind the computer, moving her head slightly so she could see Rikku properly. "Yeah," she said. "Just giving it a little more juice."

[the_merriest]

"Sweeeeeeet," Rikku said, leaning in a little. "I've been dying to crack the lid on one of those things, just to see where all the bits go, but I'd end up taking it apart and so nobody lets me tinker with theirs."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"Computers are complex machines," Kerrigan said vaguely, but without a lot of conviction one way or the other. "And these are ancient. You have a lot of experience with this stuff?"

[the_merriest]

"Not with computers," Rikku said, stepping into the room to get a better look. "Other kinds of machina, yeah. Droids and all that. We, uh, where I'm from, they got rid of all the technology, and the information on it? So you get good at just ... figuring stuff out as you go. Making it up and all that. You know?"

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"Come on over here and have a poke if you want," Kerrigan said, waving her in. She was in a lenient mood. "I'll be working on this thing all day one way or the other."

[the_merriest]

"Really?" Rikku bounced a little, then crouched down. "So what are you trying to get it to do? I kinda had a computer class last semester, so, I mean, I know kinda how they work? Like, you've got the whole mainframe going with processors and then the keyboard is like an input console, but I never really figured out what you're supposed to do with them, exactly."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"Just getting it to run a little more smoothly..." she replied, although that was somewhat of a gross understatement. "They just gave up all your tech? What gives?"

[the_merriest]

Rikku grimaced. "Religious thing. Yevon said that bad things happened because we had too much technology and most people bought it. Destroyed all their machina, burned the books that explained how it all worked, all kinds of crazy stuff. My people thought it was crap, so we were heathens and had to go live on an island. People are really stupid."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"Well, that's just stupid," Kerrigan said because she was good at the obvious and moved out of the way to grant Rikku access to the computer. "You guys deal with it?"

[the_merriest]

Rikku leaned in, still hesitant, not wanting to start yanking out wires that might be important. Neat to see how it all lined up, though. "Yeah. Kinda meant saving the world and taking out this thousand-year-old monster and the whole stupid religion? But, uh, you do what you gotta do, you know?"

She scooted in a little closer. A fan - this thing had its own self-cooling? Pretty useful. She wondered why none of the droids ever had that.

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"...A thousand-year-old monster?" Okay, so the girl's brain said that was right. "Congratulations," Kerrigan said, "Must've been hard."

She was also keeping a close eye on Rikku to make sure she wasn't actually touching anything vital.

[the_merriest]

"It sucked," Rikku said, still tracing wires with her fingers. Not removing anything. Just seeing if she could see what plugged in where. "He had this whole city going and you had to fight through it. I mean, that was after we got to Zanarkand and were supposed to be executed for treason and Seymour went crazy and had to take down that stupid bitch Yunalesca. Everybody acts like, whoa, that had to be so cool, and you're going, yeah, it was really cool. The bits where my friends died and some undead head thing slashed me up, that was awesome."

She looked up, flushing. "Sorry. Uh. Kinda bitter."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

It took her a moment to process all of that. Kerrigan blinked for a moment. Finally, she grasped one strand that had connected and said, "You fought an undead head?"

[the_merriest]

Rikku shuddered, sitting up again. "Kinda-sorta. Uh. She was an undead psycho and we thought we killed her, then she grew these weird tongue-things out of her feet? And then we thought we killed her, and this head came out of the ground. With these ugly nasty gross tongue-swipes and ugh. No idea what was gonna be next. Here, I'll grow a few chocobos out of my undead head, but evil ones!"

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"How the hell did you beat that?" Kerrigan sat back a little further, now, her head thunking mildly against the chair. "Sounds like a nightmare."

[the_merriest]

"Kinda was. We just ... hacked away at her until she stopped." Rikku hugged her knees. "I think so, anyway. I never asked. The, uh, the tongue-swipes kinda ... got me. Wakka went down and someone screamed so I turned to look and wow, talk about stupid. Next thing I know Yunie's healing me and everything hurts. They weren't so sure Wakka was gonna wake up. Uh, me either, apparently."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"Those are close to the worst," Kerrigan said, quietly. Then leaned back towards the computer, herself. "Bad stuff happens all over the place."

[the_merriest]

"You've had that, too?" Rikku asked. "Isn't it terrible? It's ... you know, it's funny, I had this split second before I blacked out and I ... I really thought that was it, you know? And instead of thinking of all the stuff I'd miss or whatever ... I was kinda feeling like, I failed. We were gonna lose and that was it and it was all for nothing. Did you ever ..."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"I'm a soldier," she said. "A good one." Kerrigan began gently moving wires again; she liked it better when her hands were occupied. "I've seen my share of hopeless situations..."

[the_merriest]

Rikku watched Kerrigan's hands playing with the wires. "Guess they weren't really hopeless, if we're still here, right?"

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"Depends on who it's hopeless for," she said, shortly.

[the_merriest]

She was silent for a long moment. "Yeah. There's ... there's that."

[on-her-korhal.livejournal.com]

"Sorry," Kerrigan said, letting go of the wires and climbing out from under the desk, "We've all got our problems."

[the_merriest]

Rikku nodded quickly. "Yeah. That's ... I mean ... it's over, you know? At least Sin's gone. It's just rebuilding now. So I'm kinda lucky. I just ... don't feel lucky, I guess."