Elaine wasn't expecting much from Ciddia, and in truth she didn't get much--but it was more than she expected.

Ciddia, as she grouchily admitted over many brief text conversations, did not have the technical details that Elaine and the scrappers needed to pursue their project, and from the way she rebelled against general questions, she didn't even seem all that confident in her general knowledge of the system. She did have bits and pieces, including private documentation that the Blackhats used to modify and design Archons... but it was high-level, designed for software that Elaine didn't have and Ciddia wouldn't give her.

It didn't help that after going through all the disk drives and documents that Elaine had about programming for ansibles, none of them helped with the immediate tasks of setting things up. A lot of it was specific versions of software libraries, how to use them properly, along with 3D modelling programs, chemistry primers, and large files full of algorithms each designed to to one or two things, like stepping through a region of 3D space and pushing or pulling on the contents to create standing sound waves--a complicated effect, but one necessary when you don't have a physical speaker or the space in your design to emulate one. Interesting, and (Elaine recalled, and assured the others) fun to play with, but nowhere near where they were at the moment.

Instead, over the course of the next two weeks, the team got a grasp of the fundamental layout of the Archon's internals. Importantly, they discovered that the system was not, as they'd feared, broken by the act of killing the Archon; instead, systems defaulted to off, and would only wake up if they received the correct request over the network. Give the size and scale of the system, unfortunately, there was no way to simply "guess and check" your way into generating the right data packet.

Which was fine, because it was never Elaine's plan to re-use the existing system--one she didn't understand and which was probably irrelevant to her goals. Elaine did have the ability to decompile and reverse engineer the code on that system, but... she needed context to understand what she was seeing, context that Ciddia could only provide in the vaguest terms.

Some things she offered were helpful, though. She knew enough to steer Elaine away from messing with most of the support chips, and she offered just enough context that Elaine would not need to rewrite the core drivers in order to make use of the system. Despite that, the process didn't leave them with a lot of confidence that they understood, well, anything.

At the end of two weeks, they ran a test designed to see if they understood everything well enough. All the system would do was power on, drop the test rig into a pocket dimension, pull it back out, and power off. These were things that should have been straightforward parts of how the system worked.

Naturally, the test failed.

"Psssssssccchhhhhittt," said Elaine, when the dreaded absolutely nothing happened. "I thought we had it. What have we missed?"

Anna and Teddy were, likewise, looking over the documents and the screens full of code and could do little more than shrug at the question. "Maybe we need to ask someone else," suggested Teddy after a long while. "I'll pull the files for people who bought Ansible blades, maybe one of them has figured something out we missed."

Elaine had assumed, momentarily, that Teddy meant computer files, or at least a detailed set of dossiers, but what he handed Elaine was an envelope containing business cards, photographs, and some small pieces of torn paper with names and addresses scribbled on them.

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Elaine held her tongue. "I guess you want me to go door to door, then?"

Teddy just shook his head. "Most of the people who bought from us are resellers," he said. "A lot of them aren't from anywhere closer to here. Me, I'd have to leave a notice with the traders, and probably beg the Administrators to deliver a message for me. You at least could go talk to traders in other places, see if you can track them down." Teddy suddenly cringed a little bit, and looked away from her. "Honestly... at this point I'd have more or less given up. I can't imagine how you still have momentum after hitting a goddamn brick wall like this."

Elaine looked at the code, at the test rig that did nothing, and couldn't help but sigh. It was the kind of situation that made her want to give up, but she was also used to pushing through much worse odds, much harder situations. As to how she got through it...

"I guess it's time we set up those game consoles, then," she said, startling Teddy out of some kind of depressive reverie.

"What?" Teddy blinked at her. "...now?"

They had been slowly going through the backlog of movies that Elaine had brought in from Bohrs' place, but for the most part, the scrappers were less interested than she'd hoped. Too many of those fantasies assumed a future so vastly different from the past of these people, that they simply couldn't get past it. Movies Elaine considered to be classics were based on concepts entirely foreign to the scrappers, like the internet, meme culture, the pervasive presence of superheroes, magic... multiple times they'd have to stop the movie so that Elaine could lecture for an hour about why a scene made sense.

"Sure. It'll be fun." A copy of Elaine stepped out of the closet with an armful of electronics and wires, shocking Teddy in a way that Elaine was getting far more used to than Teddy was. In less than an hour, Elaine had set up a big screen and a console with four controllers, three of which she handed to Teddy, Anna, and Jim.

As the others stared at the list of games going by, unable to contain their befuddlement, Elaine finally picked an element off the menu: Minecraft Aeons: Eternity Edition. "We'll start slow," she said. "This will help you get used to the controllers, and I think you'll understand the concept pretty easily. This is a survival and building type game, so I think it will be pretty familiar to you, if not the specifics..."

Within about two hours, Jim bowed out, saying it simply wasn't his kind of thing, but one of the guards on break who had been watching in awe took his place and immediately fell in with the others. Elaine, of course, alternated between doing her own thing and coming back to help people with their problems, but as day turned to evening, each of the scrappers had at least a wood and cobblestone house to hide in from the creepers and the yetis that jumped down from the mountain, while Elaine had built an iron tower high enough to reach the Skyland biome and had about a third of the resources necessary for a satellite beacon, which she hoped to use to call in an orbital strike and break through to the Upper Underworld, which would unlock titanium.

By the time Elaine called a stop for a late dinner, she could see that the scrappers had both lost a lot of stress, and most likely forgotten all of their plans for the next few days. She grinned and patted Teddy and Anna on the back. "See? I told you, it's good to help get your mind off stuff. Now, you'll find, the real problem is focusing on anything else when you could be playing video games."

Anna nodded very seriously, and Elaine thought she could see in the large woman's eyes a self-awareness, mixed with a sense that the woman was depressed and might become addicted. Teddy, though, seemed for a minute to be a total loss; even with the game quit and the console powered off, all she saw in his eye were plans. Not, she thought, real world plans, but Minecraft plans.

So she grabbed him by his shoulders and spun him around. "Alright, alright. Come on, time to take a break. Don't forget the real world, there, Teddy-boy. Come on, you can help me cook."

Even so, she caught him several times glancing back towards the machine through the evening. Elaine sighed quietly to herself, more again when the man powered the console back on in the depths of the night.

Whatever she did next, she would have to take Teddy with her, or else he would be completely gone by the time she got back.