Indira Vaikar
Indira had been walking - trudging, really - with the rest of the group. As always, she hated being pulled out of her lab. She was trying her best to look at the experience as an 'opportunity to do field work', but it wasn't entirely sticking. After Glimmergold, she had become fascinated with the massive Essai worlds and their capabilities. Modeling something of that scale and complexity was no small task, which meant that she had plenty to do for weeks or even months.
Now here she was, pulled out of her thoughts by a twenty foot tall ... thing.
All she could really think of at first was, "Who would design such a thing? The cube rule makes creatures of that size horribly inefficient-"
and then, hoping to be somewhat more useful, she tried to think of how it was managing its trick with the armor. Was it tech - nanites or something like that - and, if so, was it borrowing the minerals necessary from elsewhere in the body or did it store them for this purpose?
Storing them didn't really make sense, she decided. It seemed perfectly able to move with the plates on. '... and it probably weighs the same with or without its armor plating, so why does it need to work that way?' she thought as she regulated her fear response to be just barely noticeable. She had learned that negating it entirely was ... unproductive.
'What if,' she considered, doing her best to ignore the distracting sounds of gun fire around her, 'it's somehow borrowing the resources from the only other place that makes sense - its bones?' If she were right, then the armor was currently also a support system to make up for the reduced bone density. If not, well, it had to be shot at either way. It was charging for them now.
She opened a comm to the Captain, speaking in her usual dry, icy tone. "I think that what we saw was some sort of unusual conversion from endoskeleton to exoskeleton."
Indira raised her pistol and began to fire with the others. It seemed the right thing to do with the beast drawing nearer. "If we concentrate our fire on a joint, we may be able to bring it down. The head is likely too well defended for an easy take down from this angle."