strangetrip | [EP] Frustration of a Caged Animal

"Hey!"

From down the hallway, Peter jogs towards Alec, his brows furrowed and his lips tugged down in an expression of disapproval. He doesn't stop until he's a foot or two away from Alec and the machine.

"You can't do that -- you're going to break it."

And Peter's not entirely sure it's gonna fix itself. As far as he knows, no one here has broken a vending machine before.

He stopped with precision only a millimeter away from the glass and turned to look at the kid who had spoken. Alec sized him up - definitely a nerd.

"Uh, ya. That's kind of the point."

"Do you think that's the best way to handle things?"

Peter gives Alec A Look and then digs into his pocket for some loose change. He slips in a few coins and then punches in A-3 --

-- and nothing happens.

Peter frowns at the machine. Why did it have to make him look stupid in front of this other guy? Now it was probably going to be broken, all because it didn't want to cooperate with his demonstration.

"Yeah, no. I definitely did think to do that first. You got me." He deadpanned with a smile hiding behind his eyes.

Peter's frown at the candy machine deepens. But he's no longer angry at the machine for not functioning -- he's frowning because it's a puzzle he's determined to figure out.

His eyes scan the machine to determine the facts:

∙ The light's still on in the machine, so it's probably not a power issue.
∙ At the time he hit the button, the little screen that showed the amount panel flashed from $0.75 to $0.00.

Peter turns to Alec.

"Just give me a few minutes to see if I can fix this through non-violent methods," Peter says. "If either one of us can't figure it out, I'll -- I'll let you use whatever methods you want to get your candy."

Even Peter's not entirely sure he can figure this out. Not without hte internet, and since the place didn't exactly have high-speed he'd just have to try and use his brain. And maybe hope Alec would lend a hand.

He looked at the kid blankly. Looked like he might roll his eyes and then shake his head. And then suddenly he shifted his body and leaned up against the machine by his shoulder. "You'll probably want to first take a look at the processor first."

He was skilled at fixing things - all X5s were field trained to fix various mechanical objects in order to disable or complete a mission. But his expression continued to give off that dumb brute strength guy.

"You know where the processor is in one of these things?" Peter pats the side of the machine, then looks over at Alec. "Do you know how to access it without breaking this thing completely open?"

He watched the kid for a second. "I can probably pry off the panel without breaking the whole thing. Or you can use a screwdriver if you have one." Which didn't answer Peter's first question, but where was the fun in that?

Peter has no reason to assume that either one of these things is going to result in damage to the machine.

"I don't have a screwdriver, but I can grab a grab my keys from my room down the hall, if you think it'd help."

Peter thumbs towards the hall he came sprinting from.

Alec watched him again with pause then sighed like he was doing some big arduous task. He straightened and fished in his pockets for a second before pulling out a Swiss army knife and holding it out. "All good boy scouts should be prepared."

"Yeah, Peter agrees, watching him

"Are you, uh, a boy scout?" Peter asks. He's trying not to judge by appearances since so many people here really couldn't be, but Alec doesn't exactly look like the boy scout type. "I was a cub scout until --"

Peter pauses. If he says something, it'll just get weird.

"-- you know," he finishes, gesturing vaguely.

"Somehow I think your troop and mine have pretty different mottos." Not that he really answered the question, but to some degree Manticore was like being in a version of the boy scouts. A much more messed up version.

He continued to hold out the knife to the kid, wriggling it a bit in the air towards him and then lifting his eyebrows as if to silently say 'gonna take it or what'

"Yeah, probably." Peter takes the knife by the handle, then looks over at Alec, realizing that he doesn't actually know what to do with it.

And that's when he asks, because that's the easiest way to find out:

"What should I do with this thing?"

"Wow, really kid?" Alec just had a moment of 'kids these days' and didn't like it. He crouched and gestured to the panel which would have the mechanics for the coin reader. "You'll want to open this. So take that- " Alec gestured to the swiss army knife. "And pull out the flat head - it's there somewhere. You could even use the knife, really. And then unscrew the panel."

"Okay," Peter says, nodding. It's weird, a few minutes ago, he was confident he could handle Alec, and now he's doing Alec's bidding.

If this keeps the machine from getting broken, Peter tells himself as he flicks open a few tools before he finds the flathead.

He shoves the unneeded tools back down into the Swiss Army Knife, then unscrews the panel.

"Okay, done." Peter holds the panel up for Alec to see, then awaits next orders.

"Have you never opened up like a radio or something and screwed around with it?" Alec was genuinely interested in the answer. Maybe kids didn't do that anymore, but how useless would that be?

"Yeah," Peter says, sounding strangely more defensive than he intended to. "But most of those things aren't things that I was worried about not being able to fix if I broke them."

But now, Peter's determined to show Alec what he can do; using the screwdriver in one of the corners, he's able to pop out a secondary panel, revealing a stretch of wire connected to a circuit board on the back of it.

Peter briefly looks at the circuit board, then reaches for the phone in his back pocket. It's awkward, but he's able to hold up the panel with one hand while he navigates to his phone's flashlight app.

He turns it on and examines the little of the machine's innards that are now exposed.

"I used to take apart things a lot when I was younger," he says. "Now, mostly, I try and make things rather than modify." The Spidey-suit being one of the more recent exceptions to the rule.

Peter shuts off the light to his camera phone, and instead takes a photo of the circuit board. It was probably a good idea to know where everything plugged in, just in case they got unplugging.

Peter looks over at Alec.

"We can try swapping out the circuit board to see if that's our problem, but we might end up breaking two candy machines instead of just one."

When the kid started to work on the machine, Alec could see the kids brain working. Definitely a nerd.

"Since we don't have any soldering tools, that's probably your best bet." He nodded his head sideways for second. "Assuming of course it's a mother and. Could be a simple mechanically failure. Did the coins look like they we're reading the money or did it look like the failure was from the computer when you made the choice."

Thankfully no one was around to see Alec being smart. It would ruin his reputation.

"I can make a soldering iron if we need one," Peter says, giving the circuit board another lookover. "It's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swj_NtKcF1g>nothing fancy</a>, but it worked in a pinch." In a pinch meaning after he totally broke his webslingers in a fight with some petty thugs and didn't want to wait until his next shop class to get them fixed. "Nothing looks fried on the board," Peter says, once he's completed his survey. "The machine did read the coins. It read 75 cents before flashing 0 afterwards."

"So something's wrong between injection and selection." Alec looked at the panel from where he stood, seeing things in clear and up close as his vision let him see things from further away than most. It looked like maybe there were a few things loose.

Alec's looking at the board super intensely, and Peter can't help but wonder if there was something he overlooked.

"See something I didn't?" he asks, looking from board to Alec.

"First," Alec looked at the kid. Yes, he was holding this information hostage for a moment. "What's your name, kid, and why do you care so much about a vending machine?"

"Peter," Peter answers promptly. "And what if someone else needs a snack? I mean, the inn might fix it overnight, but we can't always count on that to happen. One day the inn might decide to stop fixing things or stop giving us unlimited chicken."

Peter shakes his head.

"We can't just count on everything to stay the way they are forever."

"If I broke the glass... wouldn't everyone be able to take what they want when they want it?" Alec actually didn't follow that line of reasoning this time instead of being a jerk.

But he was right about not being able to count of everything. Alec would give Peter that.

He pointed to the panels. "You have some wires loose." A short pause. "and I'm Alec."

"Yeah, but..." Alec has a point. And he knows it's gonna sound like the same sort of whining he did when Ned was reluctant to turn off the Training Wheel Protocol. "...I mean, can't we just act like we normally do, in the real world, instead of just beating on machines or something?"

Peter has apparently failed to grasp that Alec might actually be one of those people who does smash in candy machines in the real world.

Peter pulls up his cell phone in one hand to check the wires based on the photo, shoves it into his pocket, and then reconnects the first of them. He's thankful he remembered to take a photo first.

"You didn't answer my question, though," he says, snapping the final one back into place. "Did you see something I didn't?"

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