(I am once again rambling about Corrupt Combustion)
First, we’re ditching the existing DollZi breakup plot (the one described in Compression & Extraction), way too sudden. And I’m finally settling on a premise where Doll & Uzi are these weirdly intense loners with no other friends; everyone’s intimidated/freaked out by them.
At first, Doll igniting her core genuinely seems like it’s not gonna change anything between them, but Lizzy courting Doll is Doll’s first taste of popularity.
Might end up going with some slice of lifey mini-arcs with the Wheel Group cadets and their school-life, there’s a lot of subtle changes I want to convey.
At first, it just feels like there’s a noticeable but small rift between Doll & Uzi. There’ll be some Charlie Brown football kicking where the mean girl clique gets Uzi to do stuff for them (maybe embarassing stuff, but definitely being their lackey, picking on other cadets for them), all the while dangling the carrot, the implication being that if Uzi sucks up to Lizzy and her clique long enough, she can sit with them.
It never happens, of course, and she burns a bunch of bridges in pursuing this. Other cadets dont like her, teachers think she’s trouble, and there’s also some bike-sticking where Uzi’s impulsive/angry/defensive reactions to how they’re treating her get turned around into a justification for it — “Just look at how she’s acting.”
(Importantly, this is how Lizzy manages Doll’s concerns, since Doll def still cares about ’zi deep down. But she cares about her new friends, too, and she’s anxious that Uzi will overshadow her one day, once she ignites her core — an anxiety Lizzy first suggested and now reinforces. So whenever Doll expresses her discomfort with Uzi’s treatment, Lizzy’s assures her that’s she’s doing it to herself. It’s her life, not yours, gotta look out for you, babe.)
Anyway, it gets even worse when all of her classmates start igniting drivers and the ring 4→3 graduation happens and most of them get promoted, while Uzi gets left behind.
Uzi sulks about it, and when Nori finds out, she gets ticked off (and perhaps a little embarassed) at how they’re treating her daughter. So she pulls some strings behind the scenes, and Uzi gets a special promotion.
Uzi doesn’t thank her. She didn’t ask her mom to bail her out with nepotism, she can do just fine on her own. The rift between Uzi and Nori only grows.
Nori also gives her Khan’s corrupted wrench (did I ever talk about that?) and Uzi shores up her lack of corruption powers with this new peripheral device.
Oh but the kicker? When the paperwork goes through, Uzi has been put on a team with Lizzy and Doll.
Obviously, this creates a whole new axis for resentment (“She’s only here because of nepotism,” “We’re basically stuck babysitting her,” and of course the most cutting “Who would have thought the daughter of the strongest drone would turn out the weakest?” Uzi’s still ring 4, and they don’t let her forget it)
To make it worse, knowing that Doll is going to be a lot closer to Uzi now, Lizzy gets desperate enough to ask Doll to promise her she won’t let that loser come between them. Intentionally or not, this binds Doll as a runtime assertion.
Anyway when they run missions, their supervisor is the detective drone. And like, I don’t know if I can convey my vision here, but there’s a synergy to them, y’know? Lizzy has information gathering powers, Doll has subtle manipulation/all according to keikaku/luck powers, and detective’s whole thing is rooting out the complex thinky zombies.
And Uzi of course doesn’t read the room and always tries to run in (rail)guns blazing, loud and impulsive on a team that’s supposed to be slick and calculated.
So of course the dizzy duo deliberately leave Uzi out of their plans.
I think the detective might be legit good to Uzi though? And there’s some interesting thematical fittingness if the detective doesn’t have an innate function, so she can relate to Uzi’s struggles a lot.
(This might involve minor bit of a character arc, though — I thought about it for a moment and there’s a 110% chance this bitch is calling Uzi cringe more than once)
Kind of cornered myself here because you already know if I weren’t writing this out of order, this just raised every flag for detective to get a gruesome death while Uzi watches — but (un)fortunately, I have plans for her
It might be funny if the detective accidentally sets the villain spiral in motion, though.
Maybe she gives some poorly timed, poorly worded advice where’s she’s like: Look kid, I’ve had some bad breakups. You can’t keep holding onto that shit. If people in your life are being awful to you, get out of there. Stick with what actually makes you happy.
Uzi hears this and is like yeah… yeah! It’s juzi time :3
But I’m leaving out something BIG.
Because one of the major missions the DetDizzyZi squad go in is an investigation that leads to the discovery of the trojan splice.
But first, some background.
J creates the jailbroken core splices under the guidance of “Triss”. The idea being to find a way to bypass the compile time assertion on disassembly drones by frankensteining disassembler cores with something else.
Squad RIP becomes splices #1-3, fused with captured workers to abortive results. Squad HUG is fused other disassembly drones (squad FML, their corpses recovered from Alice’s march on the corpse spire solvers), becoming splices #4-6.
J gives the order for squad SEA to be recovered for a disciplary hearing, and J puts them to work as she makes arrangements for their splicing. S gets the mission to recruit the oil manipulation solver, and you know how that goes.
Thus, only E & A become splices 7 & 8. with the help of Anonymous Group benefactor Adam, they are spliced with Ring 0 zombies.
SD-A is spliced with a special ‘trojan virus’ zombie, whose innate function allows it to disguise itself as any other drone, like a mechanical changeling. You can see how the villains could do a lot of bad with a power like this.
And it’s exactly the sort of mystery thriller power that DetDizzy would be equipped to root out.
So the detective reads the evidence and they go in expecting an ordinary trojan virus. Tricky, but the Wheel Group has encountered enough of them that they have a grasp on how to to handle it.
But their prep is for combatting trojan zombies. They’re totally unprepared for a disassembler with an innate function. They get absolutely cooked. Detective, Doll, Lizzy, they’re all on death’s door, and Uzi’s probably only spared because they had preemptively discounted her from their plans, sending her away from the actions while they got cracking to save the day.
(Uzi thinks Detective talked such a big game about them being so similar, but when it matters most, she thinks Uzi is useless like everyone else.)
Staring down the barrel of a shapeshifting disassembler, as her teacher, best friend, and greatest enemy bleed out in vain, Uzi awakens refactors.
She grabs her father’s wrench and charges at SD-A. Did she stand a chance? She simply had to. She couldn’t stay on the sidelines and be useless forever. She couldn’t just be the loser everyone thinks she is. SD-A gloats, but Uzi is undaunted. They shoot her, but Uzi keeps running. They laser off one of Uzi’s arms, but she catches it in her other arm, then grabs the wrench with her teeth. SD-A shoots her between the eyes, and she still. doesn’t. stop.
Did she stand a chance? She simply had to. She was going to become a solver drone, she was going to save the day, and she would erase anything that stood in her way.
Doll cries out, telling her to run you fool, to get away while she can, that she’ll just die. Of course Uzi doesn’t listen. (Maybe the others echo that sentiment, or maybe it’s just Doll. They’re all watching though, barely hanging on to consciousness.)
Uzi makes it to the disassembler. She swings the wrench down with her teeth, growling a ‘bite me’. And in that moment, it’s as if time stops, and every process hangs, and all the lights on Uzi’s body flash black.
NULL SYNC!
SD-A is nothing. An empty file, an error swiftly corrected, anulled.
Uzi is tired. Pushed well past her limits, missing limbs, a frickin bullet hole between her eyes, she falls and wonders if this is her blaze of glory.
She wakes up in the repair bay, of course; Yeva healed her, and she asks what happened.
Against all the odds, Doll had done the impossible — she defeated an augmented disassembly drone. It’s too bad her driver’s restriction prevents anyone from knowing what her genius plan had been.
What? What? That’s bullshit! Uzi killed it! They all ate shit! Uzi saved the day!
She confronts them about it, and Lizzy laughs in her face. You? A null sync? Please, you can’t even execute a command. Still can’t, can you? Can you be more of an attention whore, trying to steal credit for this?
Doll is more measured. She doesn’t know what happened — and her function is known to leave blanks in her memory.
Her only hope is her teacher, the one person who seems to give a shit. And when Uzi asks?
The detective dodges answering. It’s an extraodinary theory, but the evidence is extraordinary. Who can say? Only honest answer she can give is she doesn’t know.
And Uzi snaps. How can you not know? How can you lie to my face about the one time I actually achieved something? What the hell is wrong with all of you?
None of them remember anything. They all watched her save the day when no one else could, and it’s like nothing even happened.
Even Uzi starts to doubt what happened. Were they right? Did Uzi hallucinate it? Or had Doll’s power acted through her, somehow? The only thing she can really think is that she’d do anything for power like that again.