#overtheneonsky

[queenarsinoethepoisoner]

Hermittober day two!! (Shhhhh what do you mean it's october fifth i dont think so. You should see a doctor about that)

Anyways! I have decided that bdubs either made or got given a piece of moss with googly eyes on it at some point, and now it sits by his computer set up

[queenarsinoethepoisoner]

Hermittober!

Hihi! I will be doing hermittober this year (to the best of my abilities) with the prompt list from @the-local-pineapple ! So without further ado, day one of hermittober:

Todays theme is flower, and I'm going to attempt to make each day in the world of Over the neon sky (me and @aniisol's au), so we've got an Etho walking through the city with a little bit of foliage breaking through the concrete

[aniisol]

Over The Neon Sky- Livin' Undercover (Part Two)

“Should be a straight shot to the box from here.” Etho heard Bdubs clacking away with metal-encased fingertips. “Find the box Impulse left, get the hard drive, hand it back to Impulse, pick me up dinner on the way back.”

“Are you sure that last part was in the mission objective?”

“I’m makin’ my own objectives. I’m hungry.”

“So am I. Why couldn’t Impulse just bring the drive tonight?”

“He wasn’t ‘posed to have it, so you’re stealing it for him. It just has to go missing without them pinnin' it on him.”

“Ah. What do you want to eat?”

“Mmm. Steak.”

“We don’t have the funds for that. If someone started working a little harder, maybe we would.”

“Maybe we would if someone did their missions faster!”

“Someone takes fifteen minutes to tell me if Impulse went left or right.”

“It’s hard to hack cameras! Just follow the highest redstone lines. Impulse is tall. I wanna go back to sleep.”

“He’s not the only person who wears redstone headgear in this city.” Etho glanced around him. “Or in this alley. Why were there so many people in this alley?”

“It goes straight to the fueling center. Ah! He went to the right again. There’s a garage door in this footage. I’m wiping it all.”

“Got it.” 

“If you can’t get steak—“

“I see it. I’m hanging up.” Etho switched his mic off before he could hear the barrage of halfhearted complaints about his failures as a detective. Normally he wouldn’t have needed Bdubs’s help on cams, but Impulse knew how to cover his tracks. He was their roommate, after all. Sharing a house with a detective, an operator, and a weapons tech made sure Impulse knew not to leave footprints where he didn’t want them. Especially in the city he had memorised.

Impulse had lived in Cyberpulse Valley since its founding, but only more recently had he moved in with them. He was one of the city’s builders, so he knew it like the back of his hand. He knew every back alley, every building, every underground tunnel. The escape tunnels he designed were never intended to be used like this (a quick-passage back to their illegal base of operations), but they’d already served their purpose. They’d saved people, back when Impulse became a hero. But he adapted. He was getting quite good at that.

The Valley had fallen, but not without a fight. Impulse stayed in the city he built and defended it, and the mantle followed him like he was a respected once-king. He was far too important to be stealing hard drives of AI information from the trader ships on the east-side outpost. 

That job was for Etho, whom no one else knew of at all.

While Bdubs erased evidence of his theft from private surveillance cameras, Etho slipped back to the apartment. The surrounding buildings were similarly dingy, windows cracked and paint peeling, but life nested in the crannies of broken-down things. Signs still glowed in old shops, vines twisted up walls, decommissioned maintenance robots chirped and skittered through the streets. The apartment had taken a few hits during the war, but Impulse built it to be structurally sound, and that it was. Well, Etho wouldn’t try the elevator for a million pounds, but the apartment stayed standing. The only thing at risk of tumbling it was the volume of the bass coming from their eighth-floor hideout. That was another one of the perks of the west-end Valley: there were no neighbors for miles in any direction.

It was truly a life to live.

[queenarsinoethepoisoner]

Over the Neon Sky- Livin' Undercover: pt 1

I'd advise reading the chapter first before looking at my art!

Cyberpulse city through Etho's eyes! On the right is how most people will see the city, and the left is how etho's cybernetic eye sees it, with redstone trails leading off in different ways

Alt version under cut:

[aniisol]

Over The Neon Sky- Livin' Undercover (Part One)

“Dubs. Left or right?”

“Ack! Give me a minute, man. This system ain’t instant.”

“It could be, if you’d stop letting Doc work on it in the middle of missions.” Etho leaned against the wall to wait for Bdubs’s answer.

“He’s doin’ important stuff! He’s gonna stop updating your eye if you keep talking about him like that.”

“Eh. He likes working on cybernetics too much to give me up as a project.” Etho flipped his eyepatch up, scanning down the split in the alleyway to see the faint red trails hovering in the air. He couldn’t think of anything that needed updating, but Doc kept improving it regardless. First it was focus tuning, then clarity, then a time display on a HUD. It was a magnificent piece of work, but it hardly seemed to compare to every massive project Doc had made. The engineer, however, claimed that it was technologically miles ahead of, say, his particle accelerator.

“No,” he had argued, waving a screwdriver. “That is nothing. That is algorithms. Your optic nerves are flesh. They follow no guidelines. To code redstone algorithms to flesh is significant. That is what makes me a genius.”

It was true. Maybe a little fanatic, but a genius. Even though Etho would never admit it to his face. His ego was big enough to start with.

“You think Doc won’t give up working on it ‘cause it proves he’s a better inventor than you?” Bdubs scoffed, accurately. “Take a right.”

Etho followed the light-and-heat-exposed lines in the air, tracking the patterns redstone recognized in redstone. He was part of the algorithm, connected to the expanse of wavering power lines that made up the city. 

The city was dark— dark bricks, dark streets, smog-darkened sky, but that made the lights stand out all the better. In his right eye, every low cloud had a shimmering lining from the abundant neons. The neons were untraceable in his robotic eye, as they were hooked to grids, not powered by redstone. There was no use in tracing something that had to remain stationary. Redstone was infinite, and whether it was attached to gear, a cybernetic, or another machine, it was always moving. In his left eye, the dim redstone bulbs over the alleyway left trails as they gently swung. Etho left a path wherever he walked.

He was connected to that universe-wide web, drawing a line behind him on the map that spanned everything.

[aniisol]

Over The Neon Sky

In a cyberpunk city in the far rim of space, a secret detective, an enthusiastic hacker, a bygone architect, and a mad scientist's undercover operations have come to a halt. Not only their city, but their entire way of life is in danger. Dismantling the threat behind the imminent takeover is going to require a team, but luckily, they're just the people for the job. Etho, Bdubs, Impulse, Doc, and their enemy hostage are united by two things only– saving Cyberpulse Valley and good, hard rock!

A fun little hermitcraft/life series au featuring art by @queenarsinoethepoisoner, my soulsmake partner! We’ll be posting without a schedule, but you’ll be able to find all the installments at #overtheneonsky on tumblr. Thanks to everyone @soulsmake for organising this event– we’ve had so much fun coming up with this story!

You can find Raven's art intro post here! Make sure to follow them for the accompanying art for the rest of the story as well!