1147/Plastic Tubes and Pots and Pans

Plastic Tubes and Pots and Pans
Date of Scene:	13 April 2020
Location:	Applied Sciences, Wayne Enterprises
Synopsis:	The boys work on their projects, and have a small heart-to-heart.
Cast of Characters:	Samuel Morgan, Damian Wayne

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Samuel Morgan has posed:
    They said that you couldn't put a W-24 engine on a motorbike. They were wrong. What they meant, it turns out, is that you shouldn't, and after a few failed experiments due to excessive torque, the last of which physically wrenched the transfer axle in half, Sam ended up compromising on a scratch-built W-16. And why was he essentially welding two V-8 engines together? Why, as the power plant for the bike he was building as one of his side projects. It's an unholy amalgam of heavy duty tires, armor plating and a ridiculously overpowered engine, with a transfer case more suited for some kind of high-performance main battle tank. It does, in fact, not look too dissimilar to the kind of vehicle that tends to come out of this place. Not that Sam knows this, he's just taking advantage of a lab with no budget limit.

    There's no denying that his requests for components has been a tad on the eccentric side. Tungsten-Titanium? He'd had to practically invent the alloy himself before a forge was able to make any kind of deliveries. He is, in fact, still smelting some of it on site in an arc furnace to fabricate into smaller parts and custom shaped plates. He's been at this for days... literally.

    The timelapse of the lab camera is a kind of horrible documentary of a particularly industrious hummingbird with a penchant for engineering. He flits from project to project, yet keeps everything meticulously laid out and planned, following the shortest possible routes between test benches, fabricators and assembly stations. It's like an assembly robot had gone haywire and was trying to build /everything/ at the same time without wasting as much as a single second. It's mathematics in motion.

    Now, however, Sam has finally taken a break. His coveralls are singed and stained as he sits on the lab floor, back against the armored glass wall of a testing area, in which the fire suppression system is currently fighting a battle against an experiment that has gone spectacularly, energetically wrong. Bits of casing and other material are flinging themselves at the glass, leaving spiderweb cracks in the polycarbonate coated glass designed to stop high powered rifle rounds, designed especially to contain explosions. Sam sips a bottle of water, looking content, idly petting Bear who has his head on the teen's lap.

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Damian had sent word last week. 'We are go' right to Sam's phone. He gave the location to meet. Wayne Tower, not much else. But at least there was the fact that it was in the daytime, much safer for those on the streets.

  He worked on the phone, dressed in slacks and a green button-up, a lab coat, and a Wayne Enterprises badge. There was no hiding who he was here, he was the boss's son.

  Of course, his badge also gave him access to the Penthouse at the very top of Wayne Tower. But he hasn't been there in a while.

  He had been hard at work on incorporating the alloy weave and the thermoptics. He was able to make the helmet work with ease, but something that was bendable like the suit was a much different animal.

  He'd been working just as hard at trying to make his own project go smoothely. Lucius had of course been informed of what Damian's friend did not know, the true reason behind Applied Sciences, was a technological pipeline for Batman and the rest of his family. This was to be a project that only Lucius, Damian, and Sam knew about, even though Bruce was also apprised of the situation. Everyone else, had access to this lab revoked.

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    Behind Sam, the experiment is still exploding, and doesn't look like it has a mind to stop any time soon. From time to time it sets the whole testing station fire, consumes all the oxygen in the test area and die down, only to flare up again a few seconds later with the exact same intensity as before. Occasionally bits explode.

    Finishing his water, Sam tosses the bottle in the bin, stands up after gently dislodging Bear's head from his lap, and stretches out. Without any sense of urgency, he wanders over to Damian's work benches, keeping up a neutral smile. "Thought I had it this time."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     "Use the halon system?" He suggests, before looking behind Sam, back to the fire inside. "What did you do? Make Greek Fire?"

  The woven metal and fiber was held in place with gator clips, wires trailing off to a potentiometer. He turns the dial, and the material's outer layer soon goes invisible, at least at first glance, there is a sheen though, like a mirage, that flutters.

  "It will at least work for most things. Not completely invisible, yet."

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    "There's a saying. Good enough for government work." Sam mentions, looking at the material disappear. He's looking with more than the usual set of senses, and nods slowly. "The image processing algorithm can use a few tweaks. I'll look into it, but we should get near total light absorption and reflectivity without too much occultation. So much easier when you have direct access to the the engineering samples of the latest generation of computer processors."

    Behind him, yet another fragment flings itself at the glass and embeds itself, catches fire, melts, and drips away. "The reaction creates its own oxygen, it'll burn out when the fuel has been consumed. And..." here he looks a bit uncomfortable, taking a deep breath. "Not greek fire. That was my latest attempt at the microfusion device, the actual power core. I can't get the geometry right."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Damian lifts up his goggles, taking a look at the fire in the other room. "Well, that's going to burn for a while." He comments. "How much fuel did you use?"

  Overall, he was very calm and cool about there being such a reaction this close to him. Fusion, not fission. Much different.

  "My main concern is going to be how it holds up against arms fire." He comments, regarding the sample. "Though I've got orders placed for more of this weave, along with plates. The things that they can make en masse while we make the smaller components."

  Damian's view went back to the helmet, currently the one thing that worked as designed. It was the proof of concept for the Red X project.

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    So far, Sam hasn't even glanced at the energetic reaction behind him. Almost as if he was expecting a few setbacks. "Half a grain of Palladium. It'll stop in about half an hour." He is, in fact, not quite so sure about his choice of fuel either, having found out the hard way that the design he had in mind was fueled differently than he had first thought. All the design schematics he had seen... they all turned out to have been either design proofs from the early stages of the project, or deliberate falsifications. The theory was sound, but the practicalities... it was maddening.

    He had, of course, measured Damian to a precision of two Angstrom, and knows the exact dimensions of the suit. The joints were still being fabricated, but those at least he knows will work perfectly. They're a design of his own, with interwoven flexible strips forming a whole that is every bit as dense to external force as a solid carapace. "The smaller we can go with the capacitors and conductors, the more weave can be placed in a single panel. Should react very much like Kevlar, but the point of the adaptive camo is to not get shot, remember? Once people are taking shots at you, that's what the armor plating is for."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Damian's focus turns back to the sample, the current turned down and the material returning to normal. "Indeed." He comments, turning his attention to Sam. "We are working with the best components, considering who's going to be in these suits..." Yeah, that was a compliment to Sam. "Speaking of, I have plans for the Titans that may work well. Arsenal, Hawkeye, myself, you, and looking into others." He doesn't have as many resources available to him here as in a cave, but he's been doing as much looking as he can into potential recruits.

  "For once, things seem to be going well."

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    The compliment isn't missed, as evidenced by the twitch around the corner of Sam's mouth. On anyone with less control over his own emotions, that might have turned into quite the spectacular blush. There is, however, truth in the words. Had this been a project to outfit HYDRA's foot troops, by now Sam would have slapped something 'good enough' together and called it a day. But he actually cares about the person who's going to wear this, so he demands nothing short of perfection. "I take it we'll have to cut some dead weight from that team? It'll be interesting to see how they react to a mock assault on their home base."

    He does agree that things are going well, smiling as he starts to assemble the tools he needs to begin refining the microcircuit board that's going to control the camouflage layers. "You know, someone is going to be very surprised when they see my projects are no longer in that shop class I'd been forced to use."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     "Someone? Like who?" He had assumed it was Colette, who still has a special pit in his heart reserved for hate. The boy found her observations just the worst. And he regretted not killing her when he had the chance.

  "Probably. I have my own ideas there. But it all depends on their reactions. Though I already have an idea for an opening salvo." To which he pulls out two cans of red spray paint.

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    "I think you have the person in mind already." Because yes, Sam did indeed mean Colette. His last encounter with her went spectacularly wrong, and having a safer place to store his work was both welcome and a useful reminder to a certain someone that he isn't going to be manipulated by anyone. Undoubtedly some other people would be getting a cautious notification of all of Sam's experimental work disappearing, and in a few days some people may start hitting panic buttons. But that was a problem for the future.

    "What did you have in mind? Between the two of us, we should be able to come up with a good strategy." And then some. Before he peers down into a magnifying lens armature to start custom soldering a PCB for the camo circuit, he gives those cans of spray paint a disdainful look. "Y'know I have a whole painting station set up next door, right? We can do better than commercial aerosol."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     "Oh please. This is for Titans Tower." Damian wouldn't use the good paint for this job. "When we make ourselves known. We plaster an X on their tower. Desecrate the mausoleum they've turned that place into." Damian's eyes look back to Sam. "Start with psychological warfare. Then once they are at their wits end, we strike. And we make the regime change."

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    "Did you notice the tower's lit back up again?" Sam grins at the thought. "I think after we put our mark on the tower, we turn off the lights. If the generator isn't buried too deep, I should be able to shut it off. Won't do much more than maybe reset their alarm clocks, but it's a nuisance. Then we can hijack their entertainment feed... we should record a message for them to watch when they least expect it. Make them wonder who we are, let them get a bit paranoid, then scale it up. Want to put the marks up high or by the entrance? My flight pack is already operational."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     "High up, and as thick as we can go. And hopefully as much of a nuisance as possible." He grins, before he nods. "Yes. We will have to leave them guessing. But chances are, miss high and mighty will know who it is anyway. But she's made her bed. And will reap what she has sowed." Yeah, he's still pissed in a way that borders an obsessive need for revenge.

  Damian looks back to Sam as he works, instead of the PCB he worked on. The kid had not been so intrigued by anyone else like this before. All new territory for him, but it felt...right, in a way that makes two teens basically doing mad science together completely normal.

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    "It'll be interesting to see if she takes any steps to reach out, or tries the reverse and tries to brand us as supervillains as a way to force the team into a cohesive whole." Because yes, Sam is entirely aware that what they're doing is bordering very closely to actual villainy. He idly wonders, for a moment, if this is how most villains get started... actions made for the greater good with the best of intentions, that end up going very wrong.

    It's entirely likely that the teen is aware of the eyes on him, given his almost perpetual smile these days. Ah well, if he's going to end up walking into the abyss with eyes open, at least he'll be in good company. "Something I've been meaning to ask you..."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Damian kept his eye on Sam. Before he shrugged. "Most likely not. If she thought it out. Only bad things can come from that, for her. Because what starts out as a disagreement in their world can branch out in a completely different way, and a civil war between us and them...will not end well."

  The olive skinned boy raised a brow. "Yes?"

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    "There's more to her than meets the eye, Damian. At the very least she's a mutant like me. We don't know enough about her, and that bothers me." All of which leads Sam to simply not trust Colette. But that's water under the bridge.

    He keeps his eyes on his work, but starts to choose his words very carefully. "I've... noticed you spend a lot of time here. Almost as much as I do. But I don't have any family to worry about, I don't have anyone looking over my shoulder that I can't simply shrug off, or in the worst case make disappear.... you don't have that luxury." And now he puts down the solder and flux, carefully, looking up and looking into Damian's eyes. "I care about you, you know that. So why the hell hasn't your father come looking for you yet?"

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Almost immediately, Damian starts to clam up once the question is asked. There's a lot of contention there. "The truth is, I do not know."

  It was something that hurt him, much more than he would admit. He'd never even had a conversation with Bruce father to son. And of course, he acted out, like other boys his age.

  He turns to the side, before his eyes started to water and defy his own wishes. "He probably knows where I am. I kept my phone's GPS on. But.."

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    "Does he know about us?"

    There, that's the question. It's out in the open, the one thing Sam had been worried about. He's no stranger to bias, and everything he's ever read about Bruce Wayne has led him to believe that the man is a conservative, moral and above all mainstream family man. Obviously he wonders how this could possibly explain Damian, but clearly he's worried. Worried that the knowledge of having a boyfriend has soured the relationship between father and son. Worried that he's causing a rift.

    With the soldering iron on its stand, Sam feels it safe to leave his project for a moment and walks around the table, to Damian's side. Moments later he wraps his arms around the other teen, holding him close. "I'm sorry if I've caused anything to... You know I never want to hurt you."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     His mouth turns from his normal frown to a slight smile. "Yeah, he does. But this...is from before he knew." Damian adds, at least he doesn't think Bruce is thinking that way.

  "Trust me. This was long before you were in the picture. Plus when he found out...he actually gave me a good piece of advice." Damian put his hand to Sam's side, resting on Sam's back, that warmth, wether from contact with another human, or from the fusion reaction happening, was good for the young Wayne.

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    Human contact. Such an essential part of being a well adjusted, normal human being. Leaving aside the fact that Sam is, technically, not a normal human being, in his case genuine human contact had been rare enough that he'd suffered the consequences of its lack... and he suspects Damian is very much in the same boat. So he makes this last, breathing slowly and evenly, knowing that there is a therapeutic value to it. Not to mention, of course, it feels pretty good to be holding the one person he cares about.

    "I'm going to have to have a chat with him. He's hurting you, and I'm not going to let that happen." He looks at Damian and smiles. "I'm not afraid to speak my mind to a billionaire. What's he going to do, ask his butler to throw me out?" Yeah, if only he knew, he wouldn't be joking about that. "I know he's your father, but there's things that need to be said."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     Damian's mood seems to lighten whenever Sam is around. At least he isn't likely to stab someone. The mission statement from Sam though makes him smile a bit. Just knowing he is cared about enough to stare down one of the world's most powerful men...speaks volumes.

  "Alfred would hardly follow that order." He comments, the man was actually a number of floors up from where they were. A side effect of Wayne Manor having been destroyed, meant the Wayne family was shaking it up in Gotham's tallest building. "And what do you think you're going to say?" He asks, rather idly, curious to the answer.

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    "His butler's named Alfred? Good to know." Knowledge is power, and Sam is clearly now on a mission to Have Words with the most powerful man in Gotham. It's a mission he might have been thinking about for a while.

    His embrace tightens a bit. "What I'd say? That I know, from personal experience, what it's like to have an estranged father. That he has a son that is intelligent, bright, and an absolute pleasure to be around. That he has only a few years to appreciate you, and that he's wasting time. And that I will never, ever, let anyone hurt you, least of all him."

Damian Wayne has posed:
     He didn't want to admit it hurt him. Hurting was weakness. Weakness was unacceptable for an al Ghul. But it did. He didn't even know that's what he wanted. But the boy wanted to know his father. It was the whole reason why he didn't attack after finding out. Why he stopped his assault on the others.

  He couldn't admit to anyone, even himself. So he just kept quiet, with an uneasy look on his face.

Samuel Morgan has posed:
    And there's the look. The look Sam had seen in a mirror for years, when it had become obvious that Ludwig Eissen was not going to be the father figure he wanted... no, needed. His embrace is becoming protective now, something hardening in his eyes.

    "You don't need to go through the same thing I went through. I won't let it. And if that means telling your father that's being a dick to his own son, I will. And if he keeps hurting you like this, he's going to make an enemy he'll forever regret making, I promise you that."