RP [Operation La Prossima] Verbal Sparring

[HarperMadi]

RP Date

YE 46

RP Location

Black Sands Test range, Operation La Prossima HQ

Spoiler: OOC

JP with @Hollander posted multipart

A couple hours had passed since the unfortunate and frankly unprofessional outburst by Thorn, and as she watched the others work, she considered her options. She wasn’t good at apologies. She knew that. But she looked at her arm, where every scar and every horrific surgery had been faithfully recreated in the construction of this body. Purely for the sake of functionality. Her functionality. These weren’t just beatings and injuries. Almost a third of these were modifications. By people who saw her as a tool to be used, where she was kept small, kept from feeling hunger and from feeling tired. Where breathing was necessary no matter how low the oxygen got, or how toxic the gasses. She could feel the turbine below her heart, where air passed to filters and rebreathers replacing a portion of her lungs, concentrating the oxygen in the air or providing enough. Didn’t keep her from getting injured for lack of skill, and repaired enough to get back to her task.

The damage to that Android reminded her of herself, and as she set down her tablet, she shook her head. It was too similar. And so she walked to Shinobu’s office, knocking gently on the door.

“Enter!” came the call. It was the Doctor’s voice, but it didn’t carry with it any of the attitude or cocksurety that he’d seemed to exude back in the Black Sands hangar. In fact… he sounded almost cheerful.
The door would open to a dimly lit laboratory space filled haphazardly with rolling medical terminals and technological obelisks. They stood about the room like a poorly-arranged cemetery; gray columns and silver blocks, their foreboding shapes interrupted by glowing display screens. Depending on one’s beliefs, the space looked veritably haunted. In the center of this graveyard, two ‘ghosts’ went about their business. One was the Doctor, his lab-coated body hunched in a too-short wheeled stool. A headset covered his green-haired skull, and a thick bundle of cables and wires ran from it to a system in front of him. The nameless Geboku was the other ‘ghost’, standing silently and unmoving as it observed its master.

As Thorn would enter, the android turned, internal machinery whirring quietly as it did so. Its motion ought to be silent; a sound meant that parts were noisily moving against each other inside its form. Geboku skeletal systems used Osmiridium filaments to join bone to bone, in the same way as ligaments in most humanoid bodies. It was possible that the filaments were wearing down somehow, or that the Ionic Adhesive that secured those filaments were failing. Could robots suffer from arthritis?

“Come on in, come on in. I’ll be out in a moment.” Shinobu said through a smile. By ‘out’, he must have meant ‘out’ of the virtual space he was working in, under the headset. Whatever he was working on, he was pretty damned pleased with how it was going.

“Take your time,” Thorn responded politely, offering a smile and a small bow to the nameless Geboku. “Is there any way I can help at the moment?”

As Thorn moved towards what she assumed to be the main workdesk, she observed each of the obelisks. Where another would have seen a haunted lab, Thorn saw the same clutter she had grown accustomed to in her own work. When a blooming nation would offer her asylum for her services and knowledge, the labs always started out looking like this, only growing more modern and clean as the budget grew and she could afford to hire people who had more of an eye for a clean workspace. She could work in a space like this, provided no one touched anything and messed up her organization. She respectfully didn’t touch any of the displays, nor look too deeply or try to connect. No, she wasn’t here to borrow or acquire any data sets. Not from him. Though she had some for him when he requested it. “I’m leaving a data tablet on your workdesk. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what I’m looking at with it, so I figure you’ll have better luck than I will.”

 

[Hollander]

The Doctor’s expression soured almost immediately, like a piece of ripe fruit going rotten on the counter, when he recognized the voice of the speaker. He heard her offer to help, and assumed she was probably talking to the Geboku, rather than to Shinobu; she’d seemed to have what Shinobu saw as an unusual fixation on the humanoid machine. The Geboku, too, seemed uncertain whether it, or its master, were being addressed. It looked between the two of them, and did not respond. Could it even talk?
With most of his senses locked in to the simulation, Shinobu still heard Thorn move around, and then speak about a data tablet. A seed of curiosity grew until it overcame and overshadowed his virtual project, and after a moment he found a stopping point and disconnected. He grunted as he hefted the hulk of metal and plastic off of his head, the wires and cabling creaking angrily as he set the thing down into a cradle designed to hold it. He ran a hand through his miserably-colored hair as he turned to Thorn, taking a moment to observe her once again. He hadn’t expected a visit from the… How was he to describe her? Small-bodied criminal? Antagonistic super-agent? Genius intelligence-extractor? As Shinobu retrieved his Emrys Unos and slid them up onto his nose, he decided on the most certain combination of words.

Deadly mystery.

When it came to the tablet, he considered saying something snide. And then chose to, indeed, say something snide. “And what would it be, I wonder… A series of elementary-school level mathematics equations?” he asked, voice oozing with sarcasm. He lifted the databad by its corners, checking to see whether she’d left any bloodstains on it from some recent kill. He had been utterly unconvinced by her claims that she wasn’t a first-hand killer, and in fact his skepticism extended to just about everything she had tried to tell him. It left him doubting everything she said.

“Unfortunately for both of us, nothing so mundane. Though it would be endlessly entertaining to watch you strain yourself on something a Kikyo Scout could handle. But despite both of our sarcasm, I wanted to offer an apology for my unprofessional tirade when we first met. Your Geboku triggered me. I’m a freed person, and was released by my last owner in YE:36. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to offer some restoration work to your android.”


His body language revealed how he actually enjoyed the aggressive repartee. He flung one leg over the other, placing an elbow with forced casualness on the shelf of a nearby diagnostics machine. When Thorn shared an apology, he was ready for some hidden barb or unexpected verbal strike… But none came. Instead, Thorn revealed something what sounded… genuine. Naturally, he disbelieved it immediately.

“I see…” he said carefully, trying not to show whether he believed her or not. Despite his attempt, someone trained in humanoid microfacial expressions would be able to read him like a cruel-faced, green-haired book. Still, he gestured toward the Geboku. “By all means. I think its’ spares are in…” He exhaled, thinking. Shinobu had labeled the drawers in the lab at one point, during a sudden spree of organizational spirit, but the proper use of the labeled spaces hadn’t lasted. “Either Surgical 3, or Microsoldering.”

 

[HarperMadi]

“Thanks,” she offered a nod before tossing her barb. “But if you can’t keep track of your parts, it’s no wonder your Geboku’s in such poor shape! At least when I was owned the people repairing me were cruel, not just sloppy. At least my rebreather worked.”

Microsoldering would end up being the correct slot. Aside from a number of common droid repair tools, the drawer contained:

A removed, original set of EM-J2-E3402 Communications chips and antennae
An Emrys power cell tester
Tubes of Ionic Adhesive
A kit for sewing in new strands of synthetic muscle electroactive polymers
A set of spudgers for opening and peeling skin and joints
A half-used squeeze tube of skin polymer
A heating/curing tool to seal the skin polymer
Various spare parts, including a couple optional Geboku organs
A series of pencils used down to nubs
Paperclips of different colors
A green plastic toy of some kind of large carnivorous lizard

As Thorn looked through the tools and parts, she made a mental list of what else she’d need to get. The skin would likely have to be completely replaced, or shaved and recured to match in color and not show those scars. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he didn’t believe her, so she gestured for the Geboku to join her in the bay, and tossed the classic black shirt with a sequined heart over a desk to leave herself in a sport bra and show every surgery and every mark. The underdeveloped body that stopped growing at ten or twelve, and left her trapped. She tied back her hair and motioned again, ready to get to work.

Shinobu watched as they departed, his interest fading… While the datapad remained. What could it be? Probably junk information, maybe some droll report from Barone, or yet another pre-flight check of scientific equipment. Slender hands lifted the pad, and he scanned the digitized information with feigned disinterest that… faded. That faded fast.

Really fast.

“This…” he said, to no one, because the only other humanoid beings in the room had left him for the bay.

He blinked behind his glasses, unsure, trying to reread. Was it real? There were verification tags, signatures, file structures. They… looked genuine! IT looked genuine!

“It’s…!” he said, just as eloquently as he had said ‘this’. That is to say, not eloquently at all and with a great deal of shock.

He stood up, grasping the datapad like it was some kind of lifeline. With a rush, he tried to remember which way the woman and the robot had gone, and in a few moments he surged into the bay where Thorn and the nameless Geboku had gone. He either didn’t notice, or deliberately ignored, her semi-nudity, and it could’ve been from shock at the sight, or the cascade of excitement and disbelief in what Thorn had brought him.

“You!” he called out. “Thorn! M-Miss Thorn. This… This looks real! Like the real thing, real data, verified, v-verified models, build data, transfer schemes… You HAD this?!”

“Found it on some Star Army Research Administration servers soon as I got access. You know, just looking through my leads. Apparently this is a base template. It was included in the briefing about that partial ST failure. Aah… What was her name… Anyway, it’s not the whole developer package, and probably as similar to Neko OS as the Minkan OS is. Just a platform to transfer with. I think there’s one species that uses that neural model, but I can’t be sure.” She gave a shrug, having quickly gotten to work checking the android over. She plugged in a diagnostic computer and ran the maintenance check to verify service history as she talked, not really looking at him. “Either way, I don’t have the expertise to know how to use that data. Just where it needs to go. And for all your shortcomings, that’d be you. You should be able to build off it… if you know what you’re doing.”

 

[Hollander]

Shinobu listened, stunned, as Thorn revealed a surprising understanding of what had been on the datapad. A few clues started clinking together in his mind, but he was resistant to accept that this person was… More than just a bizarre killer.

This person was also stripped down to a sports bra. The network of scars and strange marks across her visible skin told a myriad of stories; Shinobu had to suspect that most of those stories were painful. Surely those old wounds meant internal damage. Her body was strange enough anyway; how old was she, truly? Why hadn’t she applied to become a citizen of Yamatai, and got her Soul Transferred to something less damaged? Even without citizenship, Shinobu believed there were black market transfer tech out there. He, himself, had once…

He discarded the thoughts, returning to the issue at hand. “This is… I haven’t exactly had an easy time getting access to this kind of information lately.” he admitted, stepping further into the room. He was still cautious about this acerbic girl… Woman? Person? But she had given him a rather useful piece of information, asking nothing in return but for the right to repair HIS android. “Even if it isn’t the developer package, the Senti transfer methodology is fascinating. I could spend decades studying how they handle personality mapping and memory syncing.”

He watched her run through the maintenance checks for a moment, seeing that she’d cabled up to the computer correctly. She’d quipped about shortcomings, and he thought about making a crass joke linking her use of the word to her own barely-past-four-foot-height, but saw that as low-hanging fruit.

He decided to gesture at the Geboku, the datapad still in his hands. “So, does it have to have a humanoid face for it to spark an emotional reaction? Or are you equally perturbed by the dents and scratches on that FCAR?” He nodded towards a nearby Flying Carrier Automatic Remote system, or FCAR, which was indeed banged up and scratched and dented. It still seemed functional, despite the superficial wounds.

“Just the capability of being more than a tool. Service androids and personal assistants especially. I see a lot of myself in them,” Thorn gave a small shrug. “Funny thing, I read in the Senti cultural briefing that they have pretty serious religious beliefs about immortality. Something about the dead supporting and protecting their descendants through the burial steel. So ST and ST adjacent tech is pretty taboo for them. I think that was developed by a neko and a Separa. Again, I would have to look at the full report to be sure. But I didn’t think you would be interested in culture.”

Here she looked, letting her eyes trail across his form for a moment. “Visibly. Anyway. I was wondering if some time you wanted to help me out. If I can make your android look and feel like new again, of course. Transferring my mind into a new body’s what caused the alpha fork that is my sister. I assume it was too different too fast, and she brought me back so she could be a new person. Sounds stupid.”

Turning back to the readout, she started running secondary checks, double, then triple checking that the Geboku’s AI wasn’t close to a sapient iteration.

The Doctor paused at a nearby workbench, leaning his hips against it as he folded his arms, the datapad cradled in an elbow like it was an infant. He, too, had heard something of the Senti superstitions, but he hadn’t retained details of their beliefs. He considered denigrating their absurd beliefs about ancestor protectors right then and there, but suspected that might only inflame this Deadly Mystery’s anger.

“And what help would you request?” he asked carefully, cautiously.

“I’m dying,” she said simply, reaching up to disconnect the Geboku from its diagnostics. “I’m… Just over thirty, I think, and yet the modifications and damage to my body is pretty extensive. But just transferring me to a new body clearly doesn’t work. So let’s see what we can do about repairing the body I have. Unlike your Geboku, my keepers didn’t care about long term functionality.”

 

[HarperMadi]

A pin might’ve dropped in the brief moment of silence that followed. Its crash onto the floor would’ve been deafening.
As often happened, Shinobu found himself speaking before thinking, but this time his words surprised him nearly as much as Thorn herself had been surprising him since she first strolled up to the table in the bay, metaphorically firing in all directions. “Ahh. Well. The… time you have until your mission departs is limited. Is there… something you’re wanting done before that tin can takes flight? Or is it a request for IF you return?”


“If, yeah. You’re the only one who knows this, and I’d rather keep it that way. There’s not much that can be done in the time we have before liftoff. Why I’m mostly doing diagnostics right now. Lets me order parts and plan downtime for our friend here. Maybe some scar removal and rejuvenation treatments to start, maybe swapping out my cybernetics for something a bit more modern. One of the leads I was going to chase is my sister, so you’ll be pulling apart my ST data eventually, anyway.” She pat the android on the thigh, offering it a smile. “All done for now. You’re looking pretty good for your age, dude. Let me know about any specific issues and we’ll try to get you buttoned up, okay?”

The Geboku obediently followed-along as it was given more care in the span of an hour than it had received for the last three months. After the thigh-pat, it ran an internal diagnostic, the Emrys system checking over hardware reports and integrity tests. Lacking a voice module, it gave a ‘thumbs up’, remaining in place so it could be re-sealed.

When Thorn told Shinobu that she’d ‘rather keep it that way’ regarding her health, the Doctor naturally interpreted that as a threat. He took that in stride; of course he’d be expected to keep his lips sealed regarding any weaknesses she chose to show. “I… suppose we could get a current scan of you on file. Your body, I mean. I can look it over, plan a few projects that are within my skillset.” He uncrossed his arms, his slender fingers grasping the datapad carefully as he thought. “That Geboku there… It’s worked as a surgical assistant for me more than once. With a few upgrades, it could be an even more effective support. You could take it with you… Tinker with it during the dead time between tasks.” He sniffed, smirking. “Unless of course that would eat into the time you spend thinking up cutting insults.”

Giving a small chuff of laughter, Thorn picked up a tube of sealant, gently replacing the skin over the android’s diagnostics port and using her thumb to wipe away the excess. Pulling the skin taught to minimize the scar, she cured the sealant and gave a pat to indicate that she was done. “Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll have the tools for that. Basic power armor tools and some comms equipment, certainly. But android repair tools? I’m not sure Barone would be willing to spend the extra weight and volume for taking an unexpected android that’s going to be halfway apart for a solid section of the flight. Be like leaving with a wounded crew member… No offence, Gebo. Besides. Still gotta go through this system data to make sure I know what upgrade parts I need. With my busy schedule? Well. I’ll be a bit busy working for a living. And possibly repenting.”

 

[Hollander]

It was bizarre, hearing her laugh. It had the tenor of a woman with a lifetime of experience, yet the lungs it came from… Like a juvenile had been imbued with some grim wisdom. A series of dark and terrible lessons taught by an uncaring teacher. She declined to take the Geboku, and spoke of a busy schedule, and… repentance.

“To whom would you confess your sins? I suspect every other crew member on that ship is just as sinful, just as guilty.” he said, curious about what her answer would be.

“To be honest, I don’t know.” Thorn gave a shrug, retrieving her shirt and slipping it over her head. She adjusted the heart formed of green sequins before continuing with “I didn’t have much time for religion growing up. But having been my own person for a little… Almost a decade, now, I’ve met enough people and enough spirituality to wonder what of it might be true. Got me thinking. And then I realized that the best I can hope for is oblivion and nothingness. Not sure I like that. So I do my best to help. But I also know most of my jobs, someone’s going to die. And on some level, it’s gonna be my fault. And I make mistakes. I’ve enabled evil people that I thought were friends… Even lovers. Why I retired. None of my jobs were doing any good, anymore. I got a lot to pay back. You got any ideas who I should pray to?”

Dr. Kenja exhaled through his nose. Again, he swallowed the callous disregard he had for ideas of spirituality or the supernatural. Souls were but data, and the afterlife was avoidable if one simply had a good backup ready to go. “I’m afraid I do not.” he said simply. It wasn’t like him to avoid a squabble but… Somehow this just didn’t feel like the time or the place to pick a fight. “Let’s see about getting a scan of you, before you take off in a ship full of people who also have a lot to pay back.” He turned, leading the way back to his laboratory. The Geboku would follow, but strangely, it seemed to be following Thorn, rather than Shinobu.

Back in the lab, Shinobu strode toward one of the many tall, cylindrical devices that lined the laboratory’s edge. Each one was intended to hold a humanoid, but most of them had their own purposes. Some were for working on Nekovalkyrja bodies, some for recharding androids, others for being filled with liquids, and yet others for assembling and reassembling humanoid forms with the help of a hundred robotic arms. He gestured for Thorn to enter a medical scanner. Rotating cameras would buffet her body with harmless radiation, forming a three-dimensional composite of her physical makeup. Other scanners would note a variety of other biometric and medical statistics. Quick summaries were displayed on a screen near the scientist, who narrowed his eyes at what he was seeing.

“Would you like to take a look? It’s data about your body, after all.” he offered. “If you don mind me saying… You’ve been through quite a lot.”

 

[HarperMadi]

She nodded as she stepped out of the scanner. “I think I know firsthand. But it helps if we both know how much work is going to be involved.”

Looking through her own data, she paled slightly. How much of it could just be wiped away? This wasn’t the kind of damage a few hemosynth baths could take care of, and with how the cybernetics were run through her entire body, if she started growing again, it would likely begin tearing her apart from the inside. If hemosynth were involved, that process would go faster. “Explains the tattoo,” she commented after a long moment. “You’re not squeamish, right? Seeing someone like me like this, makes a good man uncomfortable on a few levels.”

“Indeed it does.” he agreed, grimly. At her questioning of his squeamishness, he raised his toxic-green eyebrows. For a moment, he actually had to self-diagnose. Did it make him squeamish? He supposed that it didn’t, but he knew the answer wasn’t likely to make Thorn feel good about herself. “I’m afraid your condition is anomalous, and worthy of study, rather than squeamishness.” he told her. “As for a ‘good man’... I’m not sure one has been invented yet.” He shook his head. “So, if you believe a Soul Transfer is out of the question, and if you are indeed stuck with the flesh you’re in… I think the wisest move is to make the best of what you have.” He set the datapad down, carefully, pulling up a rolling stool and plopping into it. He failed to offer Thorn a chair of her own.

“I’ll study your information further, but at the moment that I have you, I’ll be considering you a subject matter expert on… yourself. I theorize that allowing your body to grow any further would be… unwise. Your internal enhancements are not designed to expand with you, nor are many of them designed to be removed. At least not easily.” He paused there, dropping his glasses to look at her directly to see if he was on the right track or not.

“It’s not that I can’t ST. It’s that when the body was so different as to be just my genetics and a healthy body… Well, I think what happened is she couldn’t accept herself as me. I’m pretty sure I was supposed to be like five ten and reasonably pretty. So I’m stuck with the form. Not the body.” Thorn gave a shrug. “You’re right, though. That rebreather and turbine wasn’t built for a growing girl. Removing it? Open chest surgery. Messy. Takes a long time. Then again, when I was last ST’d, it was Section 6, not the NDC. That tech was already a decade behind before they lost it. You have the latest and greatest. Doubt you can make up for that difference, but eeh?”

He wobbled his head slowly, left and right, as though the thoughts needed to be rolled around physically inside his skull. “Section 6… Old OSO history, right? A transfer out of this cage of yours is the most ideal escape route, then. The rejection your... ‘sister’ experienced… These days we have a host of drugs and programs to prevent such a thing, but they’re available to Yamataian citizens.” He put his glasses back up on his nose and chewed his lip for a moment. “You could… attempt to lobby for citizenship after the completion of the mission. Barone may have connections that could get you brought in. You’d need to do something about your record, most likely. But if you were a citizen, you’d be able to arrange for a like-bodied transfer.”

 

[Hollander]

“Citizenship? Do you have any idea how many warrants I have? I stopped getting them framed years ago.” She gave a shrug. “It does work, though. I have a contractor license in Yamatai, and I’m working with Barome. Not sure if that qualifies me for SAINT health insurance. It’s slower, but doesn’t come with the risks of drugs, if false memories of repair procedures are inserted. Like a medically induced coma. Doesn’t hold the psychological weight.”

Shinobu pressed on, despite her justified concerns about her warrants. “You may need to spend a few decades working to pay fines. You may be expected to spend a few years in prison. Yamatai executes particularly heinous criminal soldiers, but civilians… I’d have to search to see how often they apply the death penalty to a civilian.” He slapped his knees like an old man trying to ‘wake them up’, and he stood up from the stool. “Discuss the citizenship route with Barone. I suppose we could always try to arrange something more illicit, but… The equipment we’d have access to in such a scenario wouldn’t be ideal. Given your situation, the best of the best would be the wisest course.”
He communicated with the machine through his glasses, causing a different set of information to display on the screen. A map of Thorn’s brain appeared, rotating so that Shinobu could observe its physical makeup. His glasses gave him even more detail, showing him line by line an incredible amount of information. “It would be a challenge, even with the newest techniques. You’re… not quite typical. Not common.”


“I’ll discuss it with him, but part of my pay is expungement of my criminal record. As for the weirdling… Well, Nepleslian human with Duskerian brain augments… Fairly common, I thought. If… Bit of an endangered species. But I’m not the type to go get fat and have babies on some nature preserve.” There was a dry joke there. “The viral circuitry you see in my brainpan there is part of the Geist. Think of it like a Duskerian equivalent to a SPINE. Less regulated, though.”

Shinobu Hrmm’d and Haww’d and Hoooo’d at the information. “Quite a few fingerprints on your mind, it seems.” he commented, perhaps to himself. “The inhibiting drugs you’ve been given have had some effects as well, I suspect.” He rubbed at his jaw, looking down at the screen as though it were some strange bug kicking its legs and twitching its antennae. At her joke, he seemed surprised. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t be. That wouldn’t be in my nature either.” He, too, was rather skinny. He didn’t have quite the signs of being poorly fed as Thorn, of course, but Shinobu definitely wasn’t eating regularly. “Anything else? I’ll need to study these cybernetics, but any clues you can give me now will save time.”

“I got the rebreather modified for a DION contract about eight years ago,” she pulled up the chest scan on her tablet. “You see these vaporizer coils off the turbine? I can reverse the turbine to use my filters as an inlet and exhale a thick cloud of fog. Fouls the filters something fierce and gives me a Hell of a cough afterwards, but good for getting out fast. I think I still have… Yeah, half a tank of fog goop. Looks like that was the capsaicin/LSD mix. You can keep that or upgrade it. Your call. And the flashlight is hardwired to my wrist pad, but you saw that… blood sugar and tox screen alarms in my wrist pad, all normal stuff. But we’re not keeping the flashlight or the cochlear implant if I can help it. Anything that looks newer than a decade like the Geist was consentual. Everything else wasn’t.”

 

[HarperMadi]

He leaned in as she pulled up the scan of her own chest cavity, trying to follow along. “You’ll need to understand, I’m not much of a biomedical engineer. Any… fog-expelling technologies in your body may be beyond my ability to modify or remove.” As she spoke about her wrist pad, he looked down at the tech in question. He preferred his tools and technologies to be separate and distinct from his own flesh, rather than melded with it. “And I’ll be respecting your wishes and keeping this project to myself. I’ll use the tools I have to try to formulate some kind of plan, if the soul transfer route won’t work for us. I think it will all depend on how this mission goes, and what becomes of the citizenship option.”

“Not that I don’t trust the rest of the squad. But I’m not stupid. Share what you need to to get this done, but be discreet, please. Besides, if this mission goes sideways, you have consent to respawn me. What do you think of them?”

“Discretion is easy when you prefer to work alone by default.” he said, hoping that would put her at ease. She’d mentioned the rest of the squad, which reminded him of the interest he’d taken in them all earlier. “Thieves, liars and killers.” he said immediately. “Each one is a mixture of the three, as far as I can tell. Including yourself, of course.” Now that they were finished with the displays, he shut them off; the data was uploaded to his personal systems, and he’d already had them running simulations and pulling needed medical information from the local archives about the various cybernetics Thorn had running.
“The Separa’shan… Rather rare to see in SAINT operations, I understand. She’s likely worked her way past quite a few prejudgments about her character and abilities. I think she’ll share that in common with you, to some extent. She mentioned she was… That she extracts people in combat situations, I believe. An intense occupation, pulling out the wounded and giving them emergency treatment. I think her presence would make one a little more helpful about surviving an engagement.” He shrugged, having no personal experience in combat, and no desire to gain any either. Shinobu helped design the minds of those who fought; he didn’t do the fighting himself.

“Silas was an interesting one… Also a SAINT operative, I believe, though it’s hard to tell what’s true and what isn’t with… your kind. Irregulars and saboteurs and so on. He’s a Nightwalker, which seems somehow fitting for an occupation which prefers practical, realistic operatives.” Shinobu remembered breaking his gaze with the man when he’d first looked at him; he had no desire to repeat that contest. He also remembered that brief hint of… multiple arms. “I think he also has his share of cybernetic enhancements, too.”

He paused there, finding himself eager to her her own perspective on these two so far.

“I’m inclined to agree. Thief, liar, or killer. Pick two. That Separa’s gonna be useful. She’s smart, fast, can get in places usually reserved for me. Silas is also an oddity. You’d think him the type to work alone with minimal support. But he commented about finding our reason for everyone being here. Still working on Miko. He’s good for a diversion, I suppose. That Neko seems nice. But she’s meaner than I am behind that pretty face.”

 

[Hollander]

Shinobu was thoughtful. He hadn’t been sure what to make of him, and perhaps that had been the man’s purpose. When Thorn spoke of Miko being a ‘diversion’, he wondered in what capacity. As a bullet sponge? “Some Nekovalkyrja do learn some interesting social habits as they develop.” He decided not to tangle with Thorn on the subject of whether Dokusei was meaner than she was. After all, Dokusei had revealed that she’d read Shinobu’s works, which immediately elevated the Neko in his eyes. “I consider myself an expert on what lies ‘behind her face’, so to speak. She’s a Neko. She’ll be loyal to the Empire, and she’ll complete her mission.”

Shinobu’s glasses reminded him of the time. “Speaking of mission… Was there… Anything else on your mind? Anything you want to get off your chest before you follow Barone into the void?”

“Just that I’m doing this for Candon. Under all that hoogedy boogedy shit, Candon was a good dude. I liked him. To hear that he was mortal, and the only way for him to live on was to become Barone? That hurt. I thought I was fragmenting like he was. Till I found a glitch in my drives from when my ST data was stolen. And I’ve seen what happens when someone’s ST data is stolen and weaponized. I don't want it happening to anyone else.” She gave another halfhearted shrug, considering. “I see a solid group of good operators. Remains to be seen how well they’ll work as a team. I’m a field support unit. I provide satellite support and intelligence support. I don’t usually get my hands dirty. Unless I’m on some rock collecting samples, of course. I’ve worked with people like Silas before. I can trust him to do his job, and I know you lot only trust me as far as my paycheck.”

Shinobu nodded solemnly. He knew that part… A large part of his motivation to participate in this project was personal and ego-driven. So what? The results were what mattered. If they could device countermeasures to a potentially disastrous new weapon, who would care that Shinobu’s name would also be cleared of the doubt and shame that had mired up around it?
Thorn had mentioned trust, and he wanted to add in one final thought on that regard. “Your paycheck, yes… And a chance at getting a body that’s going to stick around a little while longer.”

Realizing it was quite possible she, and the others, simply wouldn’t return, Shinobu felt he ought to do… something. Say something. He extended an over-long arm which ended in an over-long hand to Thorn. “Then… good luck. Thorn.”

Taking that hand in a surprisingly firm grip, she nodded with her shake. “Thanks, Doctor. We’ll need it.”


With that, she turned, like dust in the wind, towards her mission.