Diary Of A Girl

"We need Sentinel tech."

Molly, startled out of a reverie featuring killer unicorns, jerks awake; Kitten, asleep on her lap, stirs but doesn't open her eyes.

"I feel like we're gonna have to talk about 'phrases it's okay to wake people up with', Ange," she tells their resident tech expert, stifling a yawn with difficulty. (Techspert? She has got to get more sleep.) "'Cause that sentence is gonna feature pretty heavily in my nightmares, I swear."

Angeliqua rolls her eyes, permanently oil-stained hands clutching two mugs of coffee (one black, one milky and so sweet Molly can smell the sugar from several feet away). "Yeah, but we do." Beat. "Need Sentinel tech, I mean, not ... the other stuff."

They're all tired, Molly thinks, carefully lifting the dozing little girl as she stands and even more carefully lowers her back onto the sofa to finish her nap. Everyone is tired, all the time - except maybe Kitt - and there's no payoff, no target, and no end in sight.

"All right," she says, and - gently but firmly - shepherds the older woman out of the room and away from the sleeping six-year-old. It took her hours to convince Kitt that this was bedtime, and she's in no hurry to repeat the experience. "We need Sentinel tech." She closes the door behind them, leaving them in the half-light of the corridor between living quarters and Angie's domain, and takes the milky coffee from Angie with a murmur of thanks. "Why do we need Sentinel tech?"

Angie gives her the look of a woman who'd geared herself up for an argument and would really rather they were having it, if only so as not to waste the preparation time, but starts ticking reasons off on her fingers anyway.

"One - the Sentinel tracker you wanted. I can't replicate their signal, so I'm going to need to get a copy from the source. Several copies, if possible, because - two - my spare parts stores are basically Mother Hubbarded right now. Three - you know you wanted us to do something about reducing our psychic footprint aboveground? Well, I had a couple ideas in that direction, but all the quickest ones involve using Sentinels' in-built power dampeners. And it'll be trial and error, if it even works at all, so I'll need a lot of them. Five - your shield mechanism's playing up again, and you need an extra spare in any case. Short of dismembering Wolverine - wherever he is - again - they're the only obvious source of Adamantium round here."

She puts down the mug of coffee she's holding to gesture a 'six' with her second hand, reminding Molly that in hindsight, seeing her approach with caffeine to share had been a very bad omen indeed. "And, finally - the air con's on the blink again, and you know how Bianca gets when she can't sleep. We don't specifically need Sentinel guts to fix that with, I admit, but if you're bringing me some anyway, it'll make my life easier to use them. Might even hold for longer, you never know."

"Right." Molly rubs at her face. "So what you're saying is, not only do we need Sentinel tech, what we need is lots of Sentinel tech?"

"Yep." One of Angie's dreadlocks has managed to fall over her face despite the goggles pushing her hair back; rather than try to fix just one lock, she takes the goggles off and slides them on again, leaving her hair neatly falling down her back. "You'd be a while trying to find and beat up enough single 'bots to get me everything I need, I think. Especially since you, uh..."

"Tend to smash up all the useful bits?" Molly supplies, half-rueful and half-proud.

"Uh-huh. Your collateral damage record is an inspiration to us all, if that helps."

"Not especially, if I'm being honest, but thanks." She gives Angie a wry grin - the two of them understand each other pretty well, these days - but she can already feel the headache starting to build up behind her eyes. "All right, I'll figure something out. There a deadline on all this?"

"Not as such, but in the next week or so'd be good. We don't want another of Bianca's freak-outs if the air-con fails and she overheats while she's sleeping. Again."

Molly winces at the memory, particularly of trying to put out fires caused by a frantic pyrokinetic while trying to soothe a psychic's PTSD-induced nightmare. "You're damn right we don't. Leave it with me." A thought strikes a match. "Oh, Ange?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you get me a blueprint or a map or something for that lock-up Chase found on the scanners the other day? The one by the Sign? Something that'll at least show us more of what the inside of the place looks like."

Angie looks startled; Molly grabs the second cup from its resting place before her outflung hand can knock it over. "You're not serious?"

Molly gives her a look. "Not yet I'm not, but depending on what you find I might be. Unless you've got any better ideas?"

Angie takes her cup back and takes a long, long sip - which Molly takes to mean that she hasn't.