Jeeps part 1 - RPLOG

Participants

• Arlan
• Edel
• Jillian-C
• Spade

Date

6/5/2013

Log

The garage is marginally busy with activity at best, the main door remains heavily guarded, the vehicles are in great shape, and there is a very out of place pink jeep sitting against one wall, a rather frantic looking engineer trying to draw information out of a mechanic. The engineer, a male of average height, wearing a mix of dark blue and grey, which clash with his red baseball cap. The mechanic is a mustached man with a solid blue suit, and a bit of a belly. "Look what's wrong with it?" the engineer says, his voice rather high pitched, to get a reply of "What exactly did you do to it?" from theh mechanic.

Edel shuffles into the garage, duffle bag slung over her shoulder. "Ah, I heard someone needed help, of some kind? Is this the place?" Her eyes linger on the pink jeep.

Arriving late, Arlan was visibly uncertain why RSX would call him for something to do with their motor pool. He was a before-P-Day educated engineer, and also a nanite adept, but most of his recent engineering experience was in getting the new Eureka production lines designed and operating in the factory complex in the southwest. Transferable skills yes, but far from a match to the task unless there was something else going on here. "Hi, I'm Arlan, chief of the Corundum Engineering group at Zephyr. I wasn't given a briefing on why I was called up here, how can I help?"

Jillian-C rumbles annoyedly deep in hir chest, having been picked up by one of the other two. RSX is definitely not one of hir favorite places, but refusing to help a fellow engineer when asked is not in the cards. The pink and out-of-place jeep immediately draws hir attention, but hir instinctive defensive reaction has hir only muttering "Rrrr... Hello..." as shi pads closer.

The engineer scrambles over to the approaching group, raising his hands and lowering them slowly, saying "Lower your voices. I'm in hot water, I've got loads of freecreds, I need help. I'm new here and I uh... that jeep is my bosses, and she took real good care of it, it's like a relic... now can any of you help me?" he says, the mechanic behind him shakes his head, more to the group than himself, and his moustache moves as he frowns. "I'm honestly not sure what he did to it." The group gets marginal attention, but the garage seems too busy to give them more than a glance.

Edel scratches the back of her head. "Uh, maybe. What's... Wrong with it? Does it not start? Out of gas? Need an oil change? I used to work on cars, but I need more to go on." The husky rubs her chin and stares at the jeep.

"Maybe, do you need custom part machining? Give me a spec to work from, send me back to the industrial facility in Eureka and I can probably have a run of a dozen widgets made for you quick unless they're something complicated," Arlan offers, still not entirely sure why they'd call for him on this case.

With the jeep right in front of hir, Jillian calms down slightly as hir focus narrows. "Yeah... gonna have to third the other two. From here it looks fine, does it just not run?" Still, shi's not going to touch it until after getting some idea of what the problem is.

The mechanic shakes his head. "Oils fine, we run things mostly on electric batteries here if you can't tell, it's an antique but they've got it outfitted pretty well, gas isn't the easiest thing to procure, rather save it. I took a look, I'm pretty sure it should run, unless I missed something." He steps aside to let the group take a look for themselves, before saying "Look I gotta get back to work, if you need something let me know." before he moves off towards an armored vehicle. The engineer rubs the back of his head and groans. "Can you take a look? I've been doing a bunch of stuff, I know i'm not supposed to be mixing all these new nanites with old stuff like that, it doesn't work out, it's a pain in the ass to upkeep but I don't think I did anything wrong..." he says while looking down, gesturing to the pink vehicle.

The dog offers a shrug and steps closer to the jeep. "Might as well look, maybe something will stand out." Edel sets her bag on the ground and leans forward to peer into the engine.

"Oh for fuck's sake, never replace something that isn't broken unless you really have to or it's a genuine upgrade that's been thoroughly tested. You cowboy tinkerers annoy me," Arlan grumbles before shifting his head into a robotic-shape with enhanced optics to begin examining the engine of the car.

"Yeah... working pre-P-day vehicle like this, and you have to go start replacing things until it stops working? Did you try putting things back the way they were before you started tinkering?" Jillian pads over to the other side of the jeep, staying out of the light so Arlan can see.

As the group approaches the vehicle they can instantly tell quite a few things. The engine looks fantastic for how old the thing really is. Everything looks pretty normal, nothing remarkably out of place. However, there is an odd amount of heat coming from the vehicle. More specifically from the battery itself.

Edel nods slowly as she observes the engine and slowly waves her hand, trying to find the source of the heat. "That doesn't feel too normal. Especially for something that is just sitting here. What do you two think?"

"I see the battery radiating a lot of heat on thermal profile, I say swap it out for a spare and test the vehicle with a spare, I lift and you two guide?" Arlan proposes, as a plan of action.

Jillian-C shakes hir head. "Hot battery means it's running a lot of electricity through somewhere. If it was as simple as replacing with a spare, that mechanic should've been able to handle it by himself with a hoist." Shi looks across at the nervous RSX'er. "What did you say you replaced? And with what?" Wouldn't want to yank out a battery that's sustaining some kind of containment field, after all.

The rookie groans and looks away, an eye or two looking at the group. "I did some work under the hood, changed some fluids, ah... what are thoe things called.... fuel/ignition... ah... look I'm not really good at this okay I was just sucking up to the boss..." he says, seemingly a little frustrated. "We can swap it out, but it didn't help the last time... look I've got plenty of money..." he adds, seemingly intent on buying his way out of this mess.

Edel scowls. "You can't fix this with money. We're trying to help, but we can't just make it happen with magic, you know." With a sigh, the husky glances between the other two. "If replacing the battery didn't work, either it's something else, or all of the batteries are bad. Maybe it's not hooked up right?"

"Oh bugger. I'm gonna try to look up a shop manual for this thing, we get to have fun going part by part to see what they messed up," Arlan says to Edel and Jillian-C. He then turns to the brownnoser RSX 'mechanic' and explains bluntly, "My time is very valuable you know, your, 'A lot of money,' might not even cover the time I've already spent here to say nothing of the other two folks here. I'll fix your little mistake here but mark my words, you owe."

Jillian-C's growl has returned, although instead of hir earlier nervousness it is now due to annoyance at an incompetent self-styled 'engineer'. "When this jeep was converted over to electric, it should've LOST any 'fuel ignition' system. So you obviously don't know what the hell you were replacing. So what did you put in?"

The engineer frowns, sweating as he looks at Jillian-C and rubs the back of his head, his hat twisting around a bit as he does so. "Ah.. ah... I put a... a cap, a new cap... and I changed the coolant and did the whole 9-yards... I might have knicked the uh... display but that shouldn't..." He stutters and spouts out words that start to make little sense in the situation.

With a slow shake of her head, Edel turns back to the battery. "Well, maybe for starters we should get this thing out?" Back to the 'engineer' "Where did these batteries come from? Do you know? Are they all from the same place?"

"Hold on, I think our colleague has hit upon the heart of the matter," Arlan says to Edel. He then turns to address their self-sabotage victim and demands, "Dear 'engineer,' you broke it by fucking with something you apparently don't understand. We need all the parts that came out of it, in a box, right now. We also need to know what went into it, where, ASAP, and if you can manage it a list of everything else you touched in any way. Failing to manage that makes it much less likely that we can get it fixed at all, let alone quickly."

Jillian-C looks like shi's about to pounce on the luckless engineer, before Arlan's demand for the old parts penetrates hir head, and she subsides... slightly. "Yes... go grab everything you pulled out, assuming it hasn't been 'borrowed' by some other mechanic to fix something else, and bring it back here. WE will keep looking over your 'modifications', and see if we can figure out what the hell you did."

The engineer nods and starts to move off before he pulls his hat over his face and says 'Oh shit', moving behind Arlan, slightly afraid of what Jillian might do if he got closer. Into the garage strolls a fit and thin woman, slightly taller than engineer and wearing a yellow one piece that barely shows off her cleavage, and mostly accentuates her curves. She flicks her black hair about once, cursing and testing it's length between a glove before muttering something about long hair, before she stops and looks slightly upset. "What are all you people doing around my Jeep?" she says in a demanding tone, looking at the open hood with a scowl.

Edel glances towards the newcomer, then at the 'engineer' and shrugs at him. "Ask him, he called us." She'll be damned if she takes a fall for someone like -that-.

"From what I've gathered, a fool screwed with it, called us up to try to fix it because it doesn't seem to work now. If that works for you I'd like to leave him in your hands the moment he's done retrieving all the things he took out of your vehicle and shown us what he did. If I'm not getting paid for my time I'll gladly walk away and leave the whole mess and the fool in your hands immediately, instead," Arlan offers, knowing that 'managerial' types always like to be given a choice so that they can officially be decisionmakers.

Jillian-C clenches hir jaw, doing hir best to get hir temper outwardly under control; snarling at some luckless underling is one thing, snarling at a senior RSX executive, inside the RSX facility... quite another. Shi settles for the occasional nod, punctuating hir agreement with the other two, not trusting hir voice to be 'calm and submissive'.

The woman looks between the group, eyes resting on Arlan with a raised thin eyebrow. She then looks to Edel and says "HE worked on MY jeep and now it's broken? OH he'll pay you for your time here so far." she says as she looks to the red capped engineer. Her lips are pursed, almost like shes considering speaking again but she doesn't, she gives him one more look and says "What did you do to my jeep?" The engineer nervously lists off things he'd done, bring up the cap, the diplay, the coolant, the fuel ignition system, the fluids. She listens to him with folded arms, and then says "Bring back what you took out." before she approaches the vehicle and runs a gloved hand along it. "Well, he's paying you, please, fix my jeep." she says in a way that suggests she's forcing a calm over all of this.

Edel grins and nods. "If we get the parts, we'll see what we can do. I will, at least. I can't speak for the others." She rubs her chin. "I'm not even sure what he managed to do to the thing."

"No sense wondering what a fool that didn't know what they were doing did. I'll start by checking whether the fluids in the vehicle are actually all the right ones, someone else look for whatever the heck they were calling a fuel injection system, someone else maybe should disconnect that battery before it finishes shorting itself out?" Arlan ponders out loud before checking the various fluids to test whether the right fluids are in the right places.

Jillian-C once again nods, before turning to the battery pack and looking for wires. Knowing the engineer, he might've hooked it up several ways all at once, and pulling just one wire might be even worse than leaving it to short out as it is. And the less attention Jillian gets from RSX higher-ups, the better.

The battery looks rather safe, if you don't count the nature of the electric cables attached to them. They should be easy enough to remove. Arlan gets a whiff of something as he works, and Edel is given a smile from the woman. She crosses her legs and leans foward over the hood, trying to see what she can do to help. "I didn't tell him he could do this..." she says with a sigh.

Edel tilts her head. "Really, now? Well, on the plus side, that means you didn't appoint a bad mechanic, I guess. What would you like me to do to help?" She glances to Arlan.

"I'm not even sure what the guy put in for coolant here, anybody recognize something with a slight sour smell to it? My first guess is that maybe they put in gas with sulphur content instead of coolant but that would just be absurdly stupid." Arlan starts draining it out into a vessel if that seems adequately safe to do, hopefully since the vehicle isn't running it should be just fine without the coolant for now. Check the resevoir and pipes the coolant would go through, would it survive ethylene glycol or should I just put in some antifreeze-doped water.

Jillian-C pulls a towel out of hir pack, folds it over a few times, then lays it over the edge of the engine compartment. Gritting hir teeth, shi reaches in and starts disconnecting wires from the battery, carefully laying the bare conductors over the towel and separate from each other. First rule of electricians: treat everything as live until proven otherwise...

The woman says "Just put antifreeze coolant in it for now, I just want it working again." as she looks over the group, watching Jillian-C carefully remove the wires. The engineer comes back, hearing the conversation and rubs his head. "I ah... I used that new bio... nano.... the change of bodily fluids into ah... something... it wasn't plesant." he says as he sets a box near the jeep. Arlan drains it safely.

Edel scowls and just watches for now. "You put bio stuff in there? I'm not sure I should be surprised. If you need any tools, let me know, though I imagine the garage has plenty. More than me, at any rate."

"Antifreeze-water mix should be easy, if this thing has performance problems when it's running again drive it to our facility in Eureka, maybe we can work up a design spec for it, make some improvements, then implement a production line of these things. Bouncing meatballs know we need to make everything we can because we're cut off from everywhere else that used to make our stuff," Arlan says as he does the easy part of flushing the system with water to clean out the traces of the old fluid and then replaces it with coolant-antifreeze.

Having managed to unplug the battery from its nest, Jillian waits to let it cool down. Hopefully shi hasn't missed any connections. And in the meantime, shi starts tracing some of the wires she unplugged, trying to figure out where that electricity was going anyways.

The woman squints at him and says very plainly "What bodily fluid did you use in my jeep?" to which the engineer turns on his heels and leaves the group again. "I'm sure you'll find out tools to be satisfactory, and thank you for changing my coolant." she adds as the wires are traced, yeilding various results, all of which are correct. It seems he wasn't completely inept when he attempted this, or at least he had some form of help. The box has scarcely any parts in it, the only one of any real note is a fan, which doesn't appear to have anything to belong to.

Edel steps back to inspect the jeep at large, even getting down on the ground to peer under it, looking for any miscellaneous problems. "You know, I'm a little envious. About the jeep, I mean. Where'd you find one in good condition?"

Arlan starts checking the likely places a fan could come from while asking, "Are you sure that this fan is all that came out here? You mentioned replacing a cap as well," as he starts looking through the HVAC system and examining the radiator looking for where a fan might have disappeared from

Lacking any clues from the wiring, Jillian starts checking over the battery itself, as much as shi can while it's still in the jeep, looking for the circuit that was causing it to put heat out.

The box does indeed contain a cap, and the woman frowns and takes the fan, opening the door of the jeep she sticks it inside, right on an adjustable vent. "That's a personal effect." she says before turning to Edel. "Well..." she offers with an adjustment of her hair and a hand on her hip. "If you must know, outside the bubble, in a garage, but, it wasn't as nice as it is now. I had to work at it."

The battery looks to have been tampered with slightly, only evident by a small indentation that shouldn't be there.

Edel stands up again and dusts herself off. "I see. Well, you did good, then." To the other two: "Did you find any sources, yet?"

Humourlessly, Arlan reaches for the charging plug and disconnects it, then mutters, "Your associate is damn lucky he didn't electrocute himself while he was whizzing into your coolant tank or whatever he did," for the vehicle owner's benefit. He then adds, "We should find the battery that came out of this vehicle, this one looks to either be damaged or a different model."

Jillian-C, upon seeing Arlan unplugging the charging cable, turns so bright a white it's visible even through hir black fur. Then shi mutters "Excuse me for a moment" to the owner, and heads over to the tool wall to either find or ask for a live-wire tester and hopefully not fry hirself while re-attaching all the wires shi managed to detach.

The woman smiles and says "Thank you, we can get a new battery and see whats wrong with that one later easily. Hold on please." before she calls over towards the mechanic from earlier. "Monte! Can you bring us another battery?" she asks, to which she gets a "Sure thing, just give me a minute." With that she turns back to the group and smiles to Edel, and then the others. "Thank you for fixing his STUPIDITY, I'll be sure HE gets what's coming to him for touching MY property without asking." Jillian-C is given exactly what she asks for without much of a fuss, the works in the garage having heard well enough the going ons thus far. One of them drops something which lets out a loud clank as it hits the ground, before he picks it up and keeps working.

Edel frowns and scratches her head. "It wasn't even unplugged? Geesh." She peers back into the engine and stares at the modifications, mostly for her own benefit. "I've never worked much with fully electric vehicles, so this is pretty new to me, but even I know enough to know that's a bad idea. At least no one got hurt."

"Oh, well, anything for inter-faction cooperation I suppose, to be honest I enjoy this much more than pointing guns around and herding agents around on salvage safari. Just out of curiosity what is your associate's actual specialty? Surely it isn't working as a mechanic," Arlan asks to make conversation while he categorizes wire plugs by voltage and colours to sort out how to plug them into the battery.

Jillian-C thanks the mechanic who gives hir a tester, politely, then returns to the group at the jeep. With the battery unplugged from the jeep, and the jeep unplugged from its charger, the jeep's wires should be dead as doornails... but shi really doesn't want to find out shi's wrong, so shi starts checking all the wires shi'd removed.

The wires yeild, surpisingly, no surprises as Jillian-C checks over them. "Would you believe... he's supposed to be working on weapons modifications?" she says with a wince. "Inter-faction?" she says raising a thin eyebrow again, before monte and another mechanic bring over another battery, and start to help with the replacement process. They give Arlan a look and then allow him to take care of the rest once it's in place, moving the other one out when they go.

"It's quite likely that not all of us are from RSX. It was a pretty open invitation, if I recall," Edel says. "And to an extent, weapon modifications can be a bit more simple, thankfully. I've found that I prefer working with weaponry, myself, these days."

After he finishes the now relatively straightforward task of connecting plugs to the appropriate terminals on the battery Arlan reaches into his duster and hands hands the vehicle's owner a business card, which introduces him as the chief of Corundum Engineering. 'Yes, I'm always on the lookout for excuses not to lead the next salvage rampage through a mob of angry mutants, and coming for an engineering emergency was a pretty nice excuse, all told," Arlan explains in his usually humble and understated way.

Jillian-C quietly helps finish reconnecting the battery, then returns the tester to the person shi got it from. Missing something so simple as 'it's still plugged in' has obviously rattled hir.

The woman smiles and takes the card, looking it over and saying "Alright, is there anything else you think needs done before we try it?" she quizzes, looking slightly eager to push her form into the vehicle, but, for obivious reasons she controls herself. "Weapons are useful but so are vehicles." she adds, which gets a few nods from the workers in the room.

Edel chuckles. "Certainly. I'd love to get my hands on a motorbike, or something. As for the vehicle being ready... You'd have to ask them. I checked out some of the more mundane things, and they seem fine, but those weren't the problem." She thinks for a moment and shrugs. "I'm Edel, by the way."

"Look at indicator lights, look for anything else your weapons engineer played with or left in as extra, then look at the power on diagnostic. A high-end, recent vehicle should have sensors for everything and a diagnostic that tells you what is and isn't working properly. Jeep is a big-name brand, if this is actually a Jeep, hopefully we get a good set of warning lights and maybe even an error message panel," Arlan suggests.

Jillian-C still looks embarrassed, but stands to watch the great startup.

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