A Visitor to the Future - 99 - Downtime Discussion
There was no time to celebrate our victory beyond a pat on the back and some quick praise. Everyone except Antonia and Sasha hurried back to our team area to begin our post-match retrospective, repairs, and for our ambassadors to begin watching some of the matches of the other teams.
"Antonia had a good idea," said Sarkona as we made our way back, "Both of the opponents' Proxies were in a pretty bad state, and in the end they weren't too great of a challenge in a direct fight. She's going to offer Sasha's services to help them get back online, in return for help when we need it later. Gatecrash's Proxy barely took any damage, so it'll pay off."
Blaise and Anode disappeared into the engineering room to begin repairs with haste. As pilots, we gathered around the table on the upper section of the room. We'd join the engineers to help out as best we could once we'd discussed the results of the match.
"My opinion is that we were fortunate," said Tungsten, "The Poindexters were almost all-in on their gimmick."
Gatecrash nodded, "They couldn't take a single punch - they pretty much had a glass cannon approach to their Proxy modifications. I'd be really surprised if they make it too far in the tournament - if they take that sort of a damage every round, they're probably not going to be able to repair it! We shouldn't expect the other Proxies we encounter to be as fragile."
"Seems like a big risk on their part," I said.
"Fair play to them, though, it did almost pay off. Our bluff with the climb attempt was exactly that, a bluff. A Proxy can't climb a wall and defend itself from above, we would have been completely vulnerable," said Tungsten, "I do wonder how well they'll do in arenas without the vertical element, though. Anyway, let's talk about what we could have done differently."
After talking about it for a while, we decided that our biggest takeaway was that we should have looked up more. In practice, we'd become very used to fighting Proxies that would fight in the same way as we'd learned - as we'd been practicing against each other. Just because we couldn't easily climb the central pillar, it didn't mean that our opponents would have been so limited.
"It's not even necessarily that they had the jump jets either," finished Gatecrash, "There's no guarantee that the arenas are always going to be mirrored - there could have been a way up on their side of the arena, if you get what I'm saying?"
"Quite," said Tungsten, "Now I'm going to go help Anode, are you both coming?"
The next half an hour was a flurry of activity. Despite what I'd tried to learn recently, my engineering knowledge was still lacking, so I was mostly assigned to moving crates around and fetching parts. Which wasn't to say I wasn't being useful, but I still did feel like I could be helping more. Blaise and Anode in particular never seemed to stop for a moment, consulting readouts, tearing out parts and tinkering with replacements. Even though the tools and materials that were in use were limited compared to the modern-day standard of the Consortium, many of them were still beyond my understanding for now.
"Look," said Blaise, pointing out a cross-sectioned diagram on his data pad as he held it up to my Proxy, "Even though you never took a hit in that fight, when you were pushing that rock you caused stresses on the structure of the right arm. It's not something we have the time to replace right now - but we'll have to keep an eye on it for later. We'll have wear and tear issues even in the best outcomes!"
As Alexandra beckoned the pilots out of the room, Tungsten's Proxy was still armless, the damaged shoulder joint now occupying a section of the floor. But Anode was quite confident that she could get the damage fixed by herself, and advised Tungsten to stop worrying and to leave her be. We headed up to the table again, where we sat with our ambassadors, who had finished watching the footage of the matches they were allowed to.
"To recap," said Alexandra, "We're in the points phase of the tournament, which awards a point for a win, and none for a loss. We need to win two out of our three matches to progress to the elimination phase - so getting our first point here was ideal."
"There wasn't a great deal to go on with only one point scored," said Antonia, "So I went by which team names interested me."
"Right," said Sarkona, "Same here. Mind if I go first? I watched Preservation Momentum against Shiny Glass. They were facing off on this really spongy arena - the entire surface was really unstable beneath their feet. The major thing to note is that Shiny Glass uses non-human joints, which really played against them in that setting, they were having issued balancing. Preservation Momentum took the match, but I didn't see any sign of a gimmick. No particular fighting style or weaknesses in that team either. It was very one-sided."
I made a few notes about both teams to try and keep track of the information.
"I reviewed Cells Are Fun against The Professionals," said Alexandra, "The arena was filled with large, equidistant pillars which split up the sight lines and allowed for a surprise element to the first engagement. The Professionals are clearly boxing fans, and use that style exclusively. But it wasn't enough - Cells Are Fun had unusually resilient Proxies, although I didn't see that much armour plating. Cells Are Fun won the match. If I were to guess I'd say that they probably have redundant systems built in to the Proxies, but I can't be sure. If they do, they may have issues maintaining them in later rounds."
Finally, Antonia spoke up, "I was a bit disappointed, I watched Sneaky Sneaks vs Knockout - but the Sneaks weren't sneaky at all! Seems like they chose their name out of irony. They ran straight at Knockout and battered them to the ground. No display of gimmicks from either side. Oh! And the arena had a huge, heavy ball that swung across the arena and both teams had to dodge. The Sneaks won the match easily."
"A ball, you said - like a wrecking ball?" I asked.
"Yeah, I think so - that's an old demolition thing, isn't it?" said Antonia, "Before people started using drones and Proxies for that."
I nodded. It seemed like some of the arenas were going to be more hazardous than others.
We discussed the details for a few minutes longer, Gatecrash in particular asking questions about stance, balance, and strategy of each of the opponents, but there was only so much information that could be communicated second-hand. That, I supposed, was the point of only allowing the ambassadors to spectate matches - to bring an additional element of challenge.
"So, all in all," said Sarkona, "We got an idea of what to look out for if you go up against those teams, but there isn't really anything too much we can prepare in the next twenty minutes before our next match. I think we're going to go talk with the Outcasts, see if we can exchange information and find anything useful. Otherwise, we'll see you back here before the match starts." The three of them stood and headed off in the other team's direction.
There was nothing to do but go back and assist the engineers, as the time remaining flew by. With one win under our belt we were feeling good, but we were all cautious of any overconfidence. The description of the wrecking ball in particular had me on guard - what would the tournament's designers be throwing at us next?