TANGO. Terabyte-Augmented Nanometer Growth Organism. A swarm of tiny robots, designed to heal and revive recently-dead bodies.
Tango. Of the Tek variety. A swarm of tiny robots, accidentally granted the gift of intelligence. Technically stealing someone's body, but it's fine, they were long dead when he moved in.
As our story begins, said body was just waking up. Tango had learned the hard way that, even though, as bunch of tiny chunks of metal, he didn't really need to eat or sleep or whatever, the body he was piloting had a bad habit of collapsing if he didn't take care of it. As such, there were several hours every day where Tango couldn't do much beyond thinking, and Tango welcomed the end of these hours with delight.
His eyes opened, and a thousand tiny beings poked a thousand tiny neurons to make the body get up from the bed and stretch, the parts of the collective that were stationed at pain receptors notifying Tango's consciousness of all of his tiny aches and pains from sleeping like the dead, as it were. Tango didn't really count himself among the undead hermits, on the argument that he was more like a consciousness piloting a robot suit, except instead of a robot suit it was meat.
Tango put on his armour and elytra, and was about to fly out and greet the day when instead he ended up greeting the Zedaph, in a rather collision-esque manner.
"Oh! Hi Tango!" Zed greeted, still prone on the floor, as Tango quickly fired off all the correct nerves to roll off of him. "I was looking for you!"
"Another Zedvancement?" Tango asked.
"Exactly!" Zed jumped to his feet. "I need a distraction to distract whoever I'm taking a photo of, and you need a distraction to distract yourself from," he gestured generally in the direction of Decked Out II, "That, so I figured I'd distract my way over here so you could distract yourself into a distraction distracting distractors!"
"Say that five times fast!" Tango joked, standing up himself.
"I need a distraction– no." Zed cut himself off, chuckling. "So? You in?"
"Of course I'm in!"
"Great! First on the list is... Iskall!"
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"So I needed ridiculous amounts of slime for – you're not listening, are you?" Tango had been trying to animatedly tell a story of a misadventure he'd had in season 5 vaguely related to the pretence with which he had approached Iskall, but it was clear that the other was not paying attention.
"There's a Zedaph-shaped heat signature around that corner," they explained.
"Ah. I have... absolutely nothing to do with that. Ever. In my life. Zedaph? Who's that? I don't know a Zedaph. Do you know a Zedaph?"
"He's right there. You can come out, Zed, I see you." Iskall called.
"Dammit!" Zed yelled, coming out to greet the two. "Can your eye see... everything?"
"It has settings for a lot of things, yeah," Iskall nodded, "Heat signatures, radiation levels, presence of nanobots–"
"Presence of what?" Tango, the nanobots who currently had a presence, asked.
"Nanobots. The world I come from had a grey goo apocalypse where nanite swarms stole people's bodies and ate them from the inside out, so it was a crucial thing for survival."
"Oh," Tango, who was a nanite swarm stealing someone's body, croaked out. "Fun."
"Like, for example," Iskall flicked a switch on the side of their eye, "Zedaph doesn't have any nanobots in him."
"I wonder if I can make that a Zedvancement."
"Please don't."
"Does Tango have any nanobots in him?" Zed asked. He sounded genuinely curious. Tango was genuinely panicking.
"Tango doesn't have any nanobots in him!" Tango protested.
"No, he... does?" Iskall asked, staring at Tango as confusion morphed into horror and horror morphed into rage. Tango barely had any time to react as Iskall lunged, pinning him to the wall.
"LET HIM GO!" Iskall yelled. "PLEASE."
"Iskall, stop–" Tango tried to protest.
"I can't lose anyone else to you."
"Iskall, it's me! I'm the–" but Tango was cut off as Iskall pulled out a device from their inventory, and pressed the button.
Instantly, Tango was overwhelmed. All of his component parts were electrified, and they needed to get out to the open air. His body collapsed, convulsing and coughing as Tango poured out of it, collecting in a grey puddle on the ground.
Tango wanted to scream, but he couldn't. Without a body, he was almost inert, unable to see or hear, and only able to move small distances. It felt like he was back in the petri dish of his creation, and he loathed every bit of it. Desperately, he tried to crawl back in the direction he was pretty sure his body was, but he was suddenly aware of he feeling of being scooped up and put inside something. He wanted to cry out, but he was left without a voice as another electromagnetic pulse ran through his collective, and he was forced to shut himself down.
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Meanwhile, in the world of organic beings, a dead man opened his eyes for the first time in over a decade. He sat up, heaving in a breath of air, and looked up at the two strangers above him. They looked like they were expecting someone else.
"...Hi?" he greeted.
"Tango, are you okay?" One of the strangers, the one with the metal eye, asked. "I know that being puppeted around by one of those things can mess you up pretty badly."
Tango? Who was Tango? Or was this person talking about TANGO, that one pet project that M4rsha had had? The, uh, medical nanites? Shit, what was the acronym?"
"...Not Tango, sorry," he answered, eventually. "Nice to meet you, I'm Tekktopian!"
The two players gave each other guilty looks. Suddenly, Tekktopian realised that his presence here meant that these two had made a big mistake.
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Might do a second part at some point. We'll see.
Anyway, tomorrow you all finally get a fluffy Zedaph fic. I'm feeling benevolent.
I've been Entropy, peace out from the present!
