17737/Sentinels and Memories

Sentinels and Memories
Date of Scene:	22 April 2024
Location:	Staff Meeting Hall
Synopsis:	Monet, Cypher, and Quentin talk about the return of the Sentinels.
Cast of Characters:	Monet St. Croix, Quentin Quire, Douglas Ramsey

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Monet St. Croix has posed:
She's been looking at the photos of the smoking, occupied Starport with a massive Sentinel standing in front of it. The text of the United Nations Security Council. And Monet St. Croix has her fist ready to slam through one of the meeting room tables. She goes to forcibly take a breath to calm herself. But the sheer rage over on her face will not be something she can suppress.

Quentin Quire has posed:
What's Quentin doing in the staff meeting hall when he's not officially on staff? Who knows, and who cares? Unless the doors are locked, he's going to wander through. And probably would wander through even if the doors were locked, just stopping long enough to telekinetically pick the lock. Either way, the lavender menace is on full display, hovering a good three feet off the ground in a casual, reclined pose as he works his way through the school. One can even make out the faintest pink outline of a cabana chair under his ass. Which goes well with the bag of bar peanuts in his lap and the cocktail in hand, fancy umbrella included.

"Whoa there, princess..." Quentin comments as he floats into the staff hall and comes across Monet looking ready to murder her phone. "...what, did they cancel Survivor again?" he asks, cheerfully flippant.

Monet St. Croix has posed:
Monet St. Croix goes to look over at Quentin with a completely irritated expression. Her voice is sharp. "Do you pay attention to current events?" She restrains herself from lashing out at him further, if only to control her emotions. "There will soon be full scale Sentinel production and likely deployment once again." She was not at Genosha. But it left an imprint on her psyche. And likely did with every single mutant on the planet.

"They were deployed by the United States. Every single government will now be doing so."

Quentin Quire has posed:
To his credit, Quentin doesn't drop to the floor when Monet drops the bombshell, but his control does waver a touch, the reclining young man dropping an inch or two as his facade darkens. "Yeah, I heard. Saw it coming, too, with those lab raids and shit.. even if I wans't expecting them full-scale this soon." he says, forcing his own emotions back in check.

He was at Genosha, after all.

"Were they actually deployed by the US? Or did some mini-Master Mold just get ambitious with the first one off the line?" he asks, voice a touch shakey but mostly calm and confident. Fake it till you make it, after all. "...all I've seen is what's leaked out."

Douglas Ramsey has posed:
Doug watched the news of course; who didn't? "There's considerable amount of universal confusion about what's going on from every quarter." He clears his throat from where he's leaning in the doorway. "And because when you have a hammer, every problem becomes a nail - and then *you* get nailed." His expression is tired; spending a night intercepting DoD communications will do that to you.

"So who knows. It's far from being a universally lauded decision though, that's for sure. A weapon you can't easily control makes even jaded soldiers uncomfortable; only accountants like it, because the statistics look good on paper." He was in Genosha too. "Lot of names worth looking into who might be connected to all this. Trask, sure. Gyrich, of course. Waller? ...Maybe not. That particular monster doesn't like weapons she can't control."

Monet St. Croix has posed:
Monet St. Croix would glance at Quentin, "It was deployed off a United States Carrier. And now it stands guard over the.. Occupied Starport." Where they have another nightmare int he making if their files and technology were seized, since the X-Men had an operational facility there. "The US deployed one, as well did the Chinese send their primary government affiliated super-team. There were also multiple other forces from NATO countries present. The Sokovia Accords are officially dead. The deployment is a matter of public knowledge."

This is the stuff of nightmares for them. Everyone making Sentinels. "And if I had to guess President Luthor was nearly killed by one, so he wanted to make his own."

Quentin Quire has posed:
As Doug speaks, Quentin's little floating cabana chair drifts about to make the formerly face to face discussion a triangle of talking. "Was it though? Or did it just show up? I haven't gotten around to checking it out for myself yet..." no doubt by braindiving a few dozen of the witness' memories to get a picture for himself. "...the X-Men have shown up plenty of places with the troops, and no one has accused you guys of working for the US Government..." he says, wetting his lips with a drink as he glances to Doug, "...what about that little drone you took apart for me a few weeks back... this couldn't be related, could it? Thought you said that was future tech."

Douglas Ramsey has posed:
"Unfortunately I don't know." Doug says, as he rubs the back of his neck. "It could be? It certainly looked sophisticated. The fact that numerous NATO countries and the Chinese were involved speaks of a certain level of coordination on this; whether or not they'll start stabbing one another in the back to keep control of the spaceport remains to be seen, I suppose."

He sighs, and then walks inside enough to find a place to sit, though it's really more of a perch on the edge of the seat with his elbows on his knees. "Their logic is flawed, but understandable; this spaceport represents the primary gateway for extraterrestrial access to the planet; they want to control it. Unfortunately for them, it's a genie they can't put back into the bottle; there are galactic empires out there who dwarf the Earth by orders of magnitude who now see humans as a spacefaring race; which makes them fair game for control or colonization... and attacking refugees gives those powers a fantastic excuse for retributive action."

Monet St. Croix has posed:
Monet St. Croix would glance over at Doug and purse her lips, "Unknown. But a Sentinel deployed by the United States military and currently standing on guard of a seized location is obvious enough. And if one country is deploying Sentinels, others will too." She barely mentions the refugees - Douglas covers that one quite well.

"The Security Council almost never acts in concert. A NATO battlegroup was deployed alongside Chinese super soldiers."

Quentin Quire has posed:
Quentin watches and listens, nodding slightly even as a look of concerns flickers across his face, "...I'm not sure which I should be more worried about... that we've got Sentinels from the future trying to manipulate the timeline, or that we've got Sentinels popping up independent of all that, fielded by world governments." the concern shifts to an outright frown as he sits there in his psionic cabana chair.

Douglas Ramsey has posed:
"Interesting, isn't it? On the surface, it makes no sense." Doug laces his fingers together, and then rests them on his knee, his eyes half-lidded. "It'll get out of hand, of course. The Sentinels will eventually make the evaluative judgment that in order to maintain order, Humanity itself will need to be curtailed. It's only a matter of time. It's a Eugenic tool that will always, eventually, turn against its so-called masters."

He gestures. "And then of course there's the demagogues who'll use it to exacerbate the situation in order to offer up their own meaningless solutions to problems they helped to create."

Monet St. Croix has posed:
Monet St. Croix would glance at Quentin, "Do they have to be distinct things?" That's said in a 'gallows humor' tone but also a rather serious one. "But, we're going to have to increase our training. Significantly. Talk to Bishop and Rachel.." THey were the ones with the most 'future Sentinel' experience after all.

"Douglas, I'm not sure if it's within your field of capabilities, but do you think you have any technological counters to them?"

Quentin Quire has posed:
Quentin returns the dry comment with a shrug to Monet, taking another sip of the fruity drink. "I kinda hope they are. I don't think the future sentinels were actually up to "full size killer robot" on their timeline, and I'd hate to see what tech they brought back with them. The 'home grown' kind might be a little easier to handle?" he hopes.

Douglas Ramsey has posed:
Doug shrugs. "I can kill a sentinel easily enough; the problem is can I do it before it incapacitates me or atomizes me? It's easy enough to corrupt its programming through memetic data and either change how it functions, impair it, or otherwise cripple it. The evolved countermeasure to that is sort of - antibody data, that will restore corrupted systems based on a backup, but that itself would inhibit its ability to evolve in response to threats; to wit, becoming less vulnerable to *me* would make a Sentinel more vulnerable to others. Like the balancing act where when a Bacteria evolves to become resistant to a phage, it actually *loses* antibiotic resistance; it has to trade."

He rubs his chin. "Mhm." He's thinking about something...

Monet St. Croix has posed:
Monet St. Croix would nod thoughtfully, "We've seen them getting more advanced over time. They're.. Not operating in a static environment. Now what will happen is resources being poured into them to help advance and modernize them. And likely such technology will be shared. We need ways to stay ahead of their development cycle."

Quentin Quire has posed:
"Like Doug said, they evolve..." Quentin says in agreement to the general flow of the conversation, "...whenever they lose a fight, they figure out a counter and come back with it. Which is why it's a better idea to deal with new Sentinels rather than experienced-future-Sentinels. Who knows what future-Sentinels have already gone up against." he says with a shrug. And another sip of his drink. "...although they're still pretty vulnerable to heavy things moving at terminal velocity, so there's that at least."

Douglas Ramsey has posed:
"What we need is to find out who keeps suggesting them as a solution despite repeated failures and catastrophes." Doug mutters. "You would think guys like Bolivar Trask would be disgraced to the point where people would stop giving them contracts, and yet here we are." He drums his fingers, and then says, "I'll be honest with you two; I don't believe in segregated ethnostates. Genosha was a pretty dream but what it came down to was statues of Magneto and Mutantkind surrendering its own future to a narrow vision of what that future could be. And yet, packing up and leaving continues to sound absolutely fantastic; except that your problems always follow you."

"...I suppose I wouldn't mind a Republic X, though. Something that would give us *some* kind of institutional and political power on a global stage. As a plurality." He sits back in further thought.

Monet St. Croix has posed:
Monet St. Croix would shake her head, "Trask is dead. Hung himself in his cell." Not that that meant anything in this world. He deserved something worse. "And Sentinels are weapons of extermination. To be turned agaisnt thier hosts when their mission is done." Her smile is without humor now. Exhausted.

"We operate as if the future Sentinels hae seen how they were beaten, and are working at improving themselves. Evolution follows some level of predictability after all."

Quentin Quire has posed:
"Fight `em till we can't." Quentin agrees, draining the cocktail down with a backwards tip of his mohawked head. "Then keep fighting anyway." he adds as he looks forwards. If it was a beer can he'd probably grunt and crush it against his forehead, but he refrains from doing so to the cocktail glass. That would be a stabby stabby and that's not fun.

Douglas Ramsey has posed:
Doug steeples his fingers, and then mutters, "No, we don't quit fighting. But we need a platform to keep fighting from. Not a withdrawl; a base."

He remains lost in thought for a moment, before he says, "Something they'd have to acknowledge; then we'd force them to accept it."

Monet St. Croix has posed:
Monet St. Croix would sigh, "Then where? Not the school. Not Asteroid M. not Genosha." It's not even the Sentinels she's worried about. Now it's the possibility of the Brotherhood. Mystique had been starting to get better. That would be all gone now.

Quentin Quire has posed:
"Could go terraform a planet or something. We've got enough supergeniuses on our side that we should be able to figure it out, if we put our collective minds to it." Quentin flippantly suggests as he munches on bar peanuts. "Fuck off and leave the humans to their own devices. Can't kill us if we ain't here." he points out.

Douglas Ramsey has posed:
"Oh, eventually the sadists would come after us." Doug murmurs. "But on the other hand, they couldn't really complain about taking in refugees if it wasn't even in orbit around the Earth, could they." He steeples his fingers in front of his mouth. "I wonder... we don't have to make the planet habitable all at once. That's work on a staggering scale. We'd just need to-" He chuckles. "Heh. Ahah!" He snaps his fingers.

Monet St. Croix has posed:
Monet St. Croix would glance over at the two, "I believe you're looking at a somewhat far off idea for what we are to do. Much less the required technology and effort that such a thing would need." But, if it kept them distracted and entertained, who was she to say otherwise?

Quentin Quire has posed:
Better to blissfully come up with wacky, off the wall ideas on how to deal with the current crisis than lose oneself in extisential dread at the coming Sentinel Apocalypse. Sentinocalypse? Sentypse? Sentalypse? Whatever. Quentin gives a bit of a shrug to Monet, "I mean, having a spaceship airport for alien refugees was a far off idea, not too long ago." he notes, even as he looks towards Doug, a little curious.

Douglas Ramsey has posed:
"You'd be surprised at the tools we have available to us." Doug murmurs. "I wonder what the going intergalactic price on a neutral organic gel is." He looks down, and then says, "I might have a solution right here in my right hand." He says, as the flesh-tone of his fingers gives way to shiny black threaded with gold, before changing back again. "It's just a matter of giving it the right instructions."

He looks over to Monet, and says with a shrug, "We have the right to dream big dreams and make audacious plans, right? Why should they take that away from us?"

Monet St. Croix has posed:
Monet St. Croix would shake her head, "No, not in the slightest. You are allowed to find what grace you can. I, however, will look for more pragmatic things." Monet is too practical and too logical to go for such things, though she can understand the indulgence. "I can let you two be then?"

Quentin Quire has posed:
Quentin waves Monet off, "Go, be den-mother to the kiddos that are probably crying into their pillows over this." No doubt someone is, somewhere in the Mansion. Quentin just doesn't possess enough empathy to care to check. "...I need a refill anyway." he says, swishing around the empty cocktail glass. "...and call if there's Sentinels that need to be introduced to heavy objects moving at terminal velocity."

Douglas Ramsey has posed:
"One thing's for sure." Doug says, rather bluntly, "If we don't come up with some audacious plan, they'll just progress to trying to black-bag us in the dead of night. Again." He clears his throat, and says, "I need to talk to some people, but I'll let you know when I've refined the idea a little bit. I think it could work. It might be a long shot but..." he stretches, and then gets to his feet, "Aren't they all? I mean, until you do them."