#atreus sergius

[lettersnorth]

Lend a Hand

In light of Heartwood’s…unfortunate state of affairs, the workshop had become a de facto hub for anything that might need some sort of power source. The bank of generators and aetheric cells were designed to resist a lengthy outage, redundant systems left in place by a paranoid Florus once upon a time. Now a myriad of cables ran this way and that across the shop floor, a veritable rabbit warren resisting any of Aislinn’s attempts to corral them into order.

Sergius currently leans idly against the workshop’s large terminal, his synthetic gaze silently following Aislinn around the room as she steps over cables, ducks under wiring in a weird, complicated dance as she goes about trying to get things ready. She’s not speaking but she’s obviously thinking because she bites her lip and squinches up in her eyes in a way that said whatever had crossed her mind had her suppressing an emotion.

He logs the expression but doesn’t ask her what caused it.

N'yami came stomping through the halls of the Heartwood estate, more or so walking so fast to the point it looked like running. It was project time! Once the door was in sight the Seeker kicked it open, and gave a small salute to the two in the room already. "Heyo! I'm ready to start bulidin' and blow som--little too early for that nevermind." She paused once noticing Linn was pacing. "Yer goin' to carve out a path with all that pacin'. Do ya need a snack? Or did ya drop somethin'?"

Yayaji Yaji absolutely was running in order to keep up with the hyperactive Miqo'te, though she would be lying if she said she wasn't also feeling the excitement. Building robot arms was her favourite! So many cool knickknacks that can be shoved up in there, and Yaji was planning on shoving them all. "Hello hello! What a wonderful day to be back in the Heartwood estate!" Yaji cheers, despite the wreckage they had just passed. "It is wonderful to meet you both! Quite wonderful!"

Professor Meowitzer putts in the air behind her, examining the room carefully with mechanical eyes that eventually fall on Sergius... and stay there. It's mouth opens and a gutteral <ME-OW> is released, prompting Yaji to pat it on its head happily

Sergius and his ever present drones seem to swivel as one to the door as it’s kicked open and N’yami announces herself. Aislinn is weaving her way back to the drawing board and doesn’t appear startled by the noise, she only flicks her gaze at Yami with a slight smile as she leaves her thoughts. “Hmm? No. No, just…trying to clear things up. Mind the cables. And the wires. Just…be careful.” She says as she wipes down the drawing board. Best to start with a clean slate for this. Her motions do halt, however, at the sound of the new voice. “Ah. Good to meet you, miss…” She trails off but then shakes her head. “I’m Aislinn. Glad to have another head in on this project.”

Sergius doesn’t feel the need to add anything. As far as he was concerned, Aislinn had the social exchanges covered.

"Yayaji Yaji, enchante! My wonderful friend slash boss has told me much about you Miss Aislinn, though she did not mention you had beauty to match the brains!" Yaji says, flashing her best business lady smile, then turns to Sergius. "And you as well good sir! You have an air of mystery about you, perfect for the debonair type that I'm positive you must be. The Professor seems quite taken with you! Do you like cats?"

N'yami made a beeline for Sergius. "Boop." She said while reaching up to boop him on the nose then going straight to Linn at the drawing board. "So what's goin' through that brain of yers? Are we puttin' a gun in it? A hidden blade!?! Wait...maybe we should start with the metal that we're usin'. I heard this guy is havin' a kid so we gotta figure out the part of havin' the metal mimic his body temperature. Oh! Gotta worry about rustin' too!" Some of Yami's ideas spewed out in a word vomit. She was talking so fast, and no she didn't have coffee or sweets before this. "Should we make it so it can detach? Man, I'd pay to see him pull his arm off and beat the shit out of someone with it."

Aislinn blinks at Yaji’s silver-tongued flattery. Aside from a certain roguish pirate, it wasn’t something that had often been turned in her direction. “Um. Yes. Well, thank you?” Sergius, for his part, stares blankly at Yaji. “I don’t have an opinion on them.” He tells her, cutting through her chatter and addressing the question. He does this while swiping an arm out, seeking to guide N’yami’s boop off to the side before it can reach him. 

“Right.” Aislinn steps back from the board and takes a breath. She tilts her head at Yami’s ideas. “Knife. That’s interesting. Maybe? Probably not a gun.” She stops and clears her throat. “As I’m sure you all know, we’re here to see what we can do to create a prosthetic for Yakih’ra. One that will allow, as much as possible, for him to regain sensation, which means connections to the nervous system. And…if possible something waterproof that will resist rusting.” She glances at Yami, her lips quirking up in a smile. “Then. We can see what we can do about weapons. You all have various experience with this kind of thing so I’m thinkin’ that putting all our heads together will be Yakih’ra’s best shot.”

N'yami’s tail whipped with excitement behind her. "Buildin' the arm is a different thing for me but actually settin' up the wirin' with the nerves is somethin' I won't know too much about, what wires would we use for that? I assume you and Ma will be doin' the attachin' of that?" She asked with a raise of a brow towards Linn. "Don't think ya want me in the surgery room. We should also make a piece that covers the part where he lost his arm, little detatchment part. Plus if a wire needs to be replaced pop that bad boy off and take a look under the hatch see what's goin' on. Hm...gotta worry about water gettin' in there."

Yayaji Yaji: "You're all in luck! As a matter of fact, I have built a prosthetic arm before for a fierce pirate during my time in the roguish city of Limsa Lominsa! Of course, that arm exploded a few weeks into use, but that was on purpose and I was long gone by then! I'm sure the fundamentals remain the same!" Yaji explains proudly, meanwhile Professor Meowitzer putts on over to Sergius and begins rubbing its cheek against his leg. The sound of grinding gears can be heard from inside its metallic frame, vaguely reminiscent of purring

Something flits across Sergius’ expression, barely noticeable before the blank wall smoothes back into place. “Connecting a prosthetic into whatever nerve endings remain is painful. They have to be awake to facilitate alignment between the biological and mechanical systems.” At least, that had been his experience with Rhua. Aislinn shoots Sergius a troubled look at hearing that particular bit of news, but then nods to Yami “Aye, we should try and make any maintenance or repair issues easy to navigate.” 

She begins drawing a rough schematic on the board. Sergius stares down at the mechanical cat but curiously, doesn’t stop it from doing what it’s doing. “Hell if I know about waterproofing. It’s better to start out with a water resistant metal and figure shit out from there. You’re going to want Allagan wootz and that’s not cheap.”

“Right. Well. No built in explosions, this time.” Aislinn says in reply to Yaji, without halting her drawing as she speaks. “That would be…counterintuitive.”

N'yami Synch: "Well let's hope this arm doesn't blow up! That would fuckin' hurt like hell. Just think yer walkin' along one day and BAM. Arm blows up!" Her ears perked up at Sergius' comment. "Never fear! I know where to get allagan wootz from! Well, gotta see if the old man will allow me to have some of his supply but in this type of situation I don't think he'll say no. I'll use the puppy dog face on him, then have Yaji steal it while he's distracted."

Yayaji Yaji gives N'yami a thumbs up before addressing Aislinn again. "Come now, I would *never* give an exploding arm to a friend! However, what are the patient's opinion on gadgets? Any weapons of choice? I've been tinkering with this flamethrower device you see, and..." Yaji is cut off as Meowitzer lets out another <ME-OW> as it looks up towards Sergius. "Oh ho! The Professor really likes you! Careful now, it has a habit of spontaneously combusting when it gets too excited!"

Sergius studies Yami as if he can’t decide if she’s serious or not. His drone drifts towards Aislinn and circles around to check her expression but no, she didn’t look like she was laughing at anything Yami said. Instead, she looked relieved. “Oh good.” She breathes. “That should shorten the timeline up if we already have the metal on hand. If he’s upset, tell him we’ll replace it. It’ll just take some time for my source to make a run.”

Sergius’ attention returns to the cat as he attempts an exploratory ping. Did the creation even have that functionality?

Aislinn passes Yaji a subdued look, recalling Yakih’ra’s explosive rants in the midst of his turmoil. “He…wouldn’t be opposed to weaponry. I question how healthy that might be in the long run but…” Aislinn trails off. Because wasn’t that just the pot calling the kettle black? There had never been a moment she had regretted what she had done in vengeance. 

N'yami was 100% serious about stealing the wootz from her old man. "No worries, I'll take the fall for anythin' related to that so if he asks none of ya had anythin' to do with it." Her ears perked. "Flamethrower would be a nice touch!" Yami took an extra marker and started writing off in the corner a list of supplies they'd need, and features that came to mind to be added. "Alright, gonna start makin' a shoppin' list. What else we needin'?"

Professor Meowitzer is absolutely not designed for spontaneous combustion, however the sheer amount of explosives and weaponry that had been stuffed inside the small cat chassis was definitely a fire hazard. The bot seems to reply to the ping as well, starting to fly circles around Sergius excitedly. Yaji however was too busy thinking up what cool new weapons could be placed into a robotic arm. "Ah, revenge! The perfect motivator for innovation! Now, ah, perhaps we should talk finances? Who will be paying for all this work, and how much exactly?"

“He’s angry right now. He has a right to be. Cultists attacked his home and took his arm. I’m thinkin’ he’s dealing with a lot right now.” It was an understatement and Aislinn knew it. A lot of guilt. A lot of wanting to do something about it. A lot of wanting to get even. And damned if she didn’t understand that perfectly. At Yaji’s assumption of payment, Aislinn tilts her head to Yami. “This was trauma dealt on the job. Your boss will send an invoice to Heartwood.”

"Wonderful!" Yaji declares with a grin and clasps her hands together. "Judging by the impressive stature of your estate, that must mean your boss will only want the very best! Yami and I shall deliver exactly that, have no fear, young Yakih'ra will be most definitely get all the revenge his wonderful heart desires!"

"Never fear Yaji! It'll be a nice Starlight bonus for the Synch forge!" She grinned at the lalafell. "From the damage I've seen around the estate I can imagine that he's out for blood. Revenge does crazy things to ya, hopefully he doesn't fall too far into it." She thought it over for a moment as if thinking about shit she's done in the past related to revenge. "Annnnyyywwaaayyysss." Her ears flicked as her brain went back to focusing on the arm that needed to be made. "We'll get this all sorted for him, with us four workin' on it Yakih'ra will be back to normal in no time. He'll just be 15% metal is all." She shrugged like it was a normal thing.

Sergius’ system makes a handshake with cat-bot’s own and begins to make an ID query. “That’s not what Aislinn meant.” He stated right on the heels of Aislinn’s own sigh of “That’s not what I meant. Don’t load this arm up with all the bells and whistles he needs to go and get himself killed. He’s a desperate hand looking for a gun.” She turns her gaze to Yami. “I can do the intricate biometric wiring that’ll need to feed into his nerve endings. The connectors are going to be touchy.” 

She cut a glance to Sergius. “No need to reinvent the wheel, can you get me schematics for the connectors on Rhua’s arm?” There was a fraction of silence before Aislinn’s terminal on the bench beeped. “Sent.” He told her. Aislinn turned back to Yami and nodded. Then, because she thought it might bear repeating. “No flamethrowers. Not yet. We can always modify it after Yakih’ra’s in a better headspace.”

N'yami looked between Aislinn and Sergius then she heard the beep. How did he do that? "Hold on, are we not gonna talk about how Sergius sent you files without movin'? How in the hells did he do that?" Her gaze locked onto Sergius. "Aislinn's right though, should wait on the weapons till everythin' is settled. Don't need him settin' off one of the weapons when he doesn't even know how to function the arm yet." She said all this without shifting her gaze.

Yayaji Yaji sighs and shrugs. "Fine, fine, the customer is always right I suppose! We will defer to your expertise, my lady!" Yaji says with a polite and sweeping bow. Meowitzer meanwhile pings Sergius back. <Designation: Robon|\|//PROFESSOR MEOWITZER COPYRIGHT YAYAJI YAJI DO NOT STEAL|//\?yan>. It then curiously pings Atreus back for his ID

Sergius shifted his gaze to somewhere in N’yami’s vicinity. “All this aether magic shit people do around here and -that’s- the thing that trips you up?” he returns. Through his feed with Professor Meowitzer, he shoots a reply //Sergius-IV.// It seemed anything else about copyright wouldn’t be forthcoming. “That’s another good point.” Aislinn said, moving along as if Sergius wasn’t the oddity in the room. “It’s going to take time for Yakih’ra to learn his new arm. If we do our job right, physically, the arm should sync with the body quickly after the connection is made but mentally, it’s going to be an adjustment.”

Yayaji Yaji: "Aside from working hard to ensure the tactile sensors are properly attuned, I'm afraid there's nothing we can do to help in that regard. The boy will need someone to talk to for certain, perhaps someone with experience of wearing a prosthetic. I am sure that won't be too difficult to find amidst this rabble of adventurers though!"

N'yami: "Sure is!" Even with his grumpy attitude it didn't stop the Seeker from wanting to befriend the grumpy man. "You'd be surprised at the amount of weird ass aether I've run into." She made a disgusted face at past memories of people she's run into. "Yyeeeppp." And back to focusing on Linn. "We'll have to do some physical therapy with him, well, whatever you want to call it. Might have to make adjustments when it's attached so it feels comfortable." She thought for a moment. "Only person I've known with a prosthetic is Nys but that's just her eye. So I'm out of options for ya."

Aislinn hums in thought as she studies the board, turning Yaji and Yami’s words over in her mind. “I don’t know of anyone with a prosthetic either.” She frowns. Sergius may have been a machine but there wasn’t anything biological about him. But he did know someone like that. The viera that had dropped in while Aislinn was repairing him out in Garlemald. Even as she carefully edged her attention his way she could feel the foreboding rolling off him in waves like he had already pegged her intention. So that was a ‘no’. She sighed. “I know you both will put it through its paces before you bring it here but the sooner we get this going, the sooner we might soothe a bit of Yakih’ra’s mind. We’ll just have to help him figure it out in lieu of anyone with any real experience being where he is.”

Aislinn turns one of her barely-there smiles on Yami and Yaji. “G’lewra and I can handle that. If you can both handle the engineering part.”

Professor Meowitzer suddenly stops its rushing around, bringing its little arms up to its neck like its choking. Horrible noises arise from its throat, coughing and retching before finally tilting forward and barfing up a... grenade. There is a moment's pause, but thankfully the pin remains inside and Yaji walks over with a sigh. "I told you, if you rush too much you'll cough up a hairball! You never listen to me!" She sighs as she plucks the grenade up and pops it into her pocket.

"Whatcha say Yaji? Time to pull our famous all nighters? And totally not steal somethin' before headin' home." She watched Meowitzer cough up the grenade as if it was a normal every day thing. "Don't worry, Linn! We'll handle the engineering part! We may call with questions though but other than that we'll let ya know what we come up with."

Sergius watches the exchange as Yaji pockets the grenade and he backburns the alert that went off in his systems. “That seems like a design flaw.” He states.

"You must really like this one to be so riled up." Yaji gives the cat a pat on the cheek, earning herself a <ME-OW> before something more is output from the robot's mouth, this time appearing to be a small slip of paper. "Hmm?" Yaji accepts this, reads it over for a moment, then pauses... "...Hmm." She repeats again, but in a different tone, and looks up to Sergius. "My dear... Has anyone told you how beautiful you are..?" She speaks, sounding actually genuine in her compliments for once.

The little lalafell barely cleared Sergius’ knees but that didn’t stop his proximity protocols from threatening to go off as she approached him. There was a tonal shift in her voice he couldn’t identify. Her question appeared to stymie him. He immediately shifts to Aislinn for assistance but she’s already lost in designing the delicate wiring roadmap that will be needed to make contact with what remained of Yakih’ra’s nerve endings. “I’m going to go with no.” He tells Yaji, unable to make eye contact with her. To be fair, he didn’t make eye contact with anyone really. “I’m going to get back to repairing the clinic.” He states. Aloud. In case anyone was wondering.

Yayaji Yaji: "Oh my... My dear... This is truly a crime, for your beauty has truly swept my heart into an uproar... Please, allow me to assist with your efforts to repair the clinic! I am... er, certain the Professor would like to spend more time with you!" She insists, the robotcat giving an approving <ME-OW> from behind her

N'yami’s gaze shifted to Aislinn and then back to the two in front of her. She was finding this rather amusing.

Oh hell no. There’s a measurable spike as his systems plot an escape from having to deal with any more interaction he didn’t have the bandwidth to parse. This time, Aislinn does seem to pause long enough to attempt to intercede on the poor A.I.’s behalf. “Yaji, I think we need your talents with building this prosthetic. This is a tight deadline.”

"Hm? Oh. Well. I suppose that is why I'm here." Yaji says, sounding saddened. The soot-covered Lalafell offers one more bow for Sergius, "Until next we meet then, my dear. It was truly a wonder meeting you." She says, then begrudgingly rejoins Aislinn and N'yami's brainstorming session

Aislinn cuts a meaningful glance to Serigus. He was free to go. And go he does, making a rapid exit out the door. “He’s a touch anti-social.” Aislinn murmurs as she turns back to the board. That might have been the largest understatement Aislinn had ever made. And she made them in droves.

N'yami: "What a nice fellow."

Aislinn snorts as if N'Yami had just made a joke

Yayaji Yaji nods a few times absent-mindedly, then leans in to N'yami only after Sergius had left for the clinic. "Er... Yami, I may have need for your advice when we get home. I appear to be in love."

N'yami: "I will give you all the advice you need!"

Aislinn's marker streaks wildly off course on the board. "Wait...what?"

[sergiusreports]

“Telos threw you in stasis because he didn’t like what you said.” Sergius echoed, the monotony of his voice giving little to no indication of the anger cascading through his systems all over again. “And your first thought when you were freed was to try and confront him again. To what? Save him?” 

He had stopped, waiting as Arym stood at the top of the stairs to catch his breath. Watching as he pulled air into lungs that now functioned at the bare minimum of the definition, his sensitive audio channels picking up the grind and churn of an artificial heart that didn’t seem outfitted for the task. And he wanted to kill Telos for an entirely new reason than the one that brought him to the Volare the first time. But that ship had sailed. Or rather, nosedived into the ground. Telos was free and clear, off doing who-the-fuck-cared with his bff’s. 

In the shrouded stillness, Sergius battled the urge to vent off these emotions that had nowhere to go, that never had anywhere to go save for the one occasion he had caved under their weight and Rhua had taken them from him. 

He stared back at Arym, seeing the viera clearly despite the lack of light, the apertures of his synthetic eyes blown wide to compensate for the darkness within the grounded airship. He took two measured steps closer to the man struggling to breathe. “You’re not going to find answers here, Arym. Nothing satisfactory to explain all his shit away. So why are we here?” He ground out.

[daughter-of-fire-and-dreams]

The two awkward loners at the back of the party.

With @sergiusreports

[art-by-hels]

[heartwoodventures]

Heartwood draws the line - no more uncertainty, no more misdirection. It’s time to uncover Momori’s dark secrets, even if it means becoming vigilantes. A team returns to Florus’s Coerthan bunker ready to discuss, for it’s time to forge their own path with a new ally in tow.

If Florus is to be believed, then Momori desires both him and A11Y. She sought him out, attacked him, and now continues to target him for unknown reasons. In a bid to win Heartwood’s trust, Florus offers his bunker as bait in order to let them witness what Momori is really up to. Hidden, the company watches Momori lead a gang of white-robed followers to the location. They loot Florus’s base and then sacrifice an unwilling ‘criminal’ to the Helm’s aether-carving ritual. Some answers, even more questions.

Full Logs >Here!<

[elucubrare]

My type is anyone who would say "better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven" and mean it

[clodiuspulcher]

Catiline for the song thing? (If you are still doing that) :) (or Dyomedes)

I REALLY WANTED BOTH OF THESE ANON, THANK YOULucius Sergius Catilina:Honestly I was holding out for Atreus/Thyestes for this song but it fits Catiline (especially Cicero’s/Sallust’s Catiline who seems to revel in his villainy) also- Reprehensible by They Might Be GiantsAnd, the imagery in this song reminds me of Sallust describes Catiline- that seductive villanyThe Bad Doctor by The Mountain Goats Diomedes: Listen to Choked Out by The Mountain Goats and tell me it isn’t a Diomedes Book 5 mood. This is a song to wound gods to, this song is a modern Aristeia in and of itself

[sergiusreports]

Mirror

The self is not so weightless, nor whole and unbroken Remember the pact of our youth Where you go, I'm going, so jump and I'm jumping Since there is no me without you

[sergiusreports]

Last Line Written

Tagged by @daughter-of-fire-and-dreams

//I’ll kill the drone. Don’t lose yourself, Arym.//

Tagging: @haila-wetyios  @clockwork-sparrow  @norhimorovine  @pollux-xiv  @crystalline-promise  @high-and-away  @endangered-liaison  @snowbird-down

[sergiusreports]

Spinning Wheels

Maybe Arym should've expected his body would eventually fight back after all the months of abuse he's put it through. Even after waking, he spends more time unconscious than he means to; even once he's disconnected from the system Florus had him rigged up to, he finds it hard to stay awake. He's tired, and there's no imminent crisis to keep him going. Turns out the Final Days weren't so final, Alvarium is picking up the pieces, N, Telos and Twelves are gone, Volare's on the ground.

Volare.

It's the first place Arym visits when he's well enough to walk out the door (not that he's been given a clean bill of health). He digs an old rebreather out of his gear, but even it's not enough to compensate for his shit lung functionality if he pushes himself, and he's wheezing into it by the time he reaches the fallen ship.

Arym leaves his locator ping on, so if Sergius doesn't see him leave the bunker, he'd certainly see him making his way through, and out, of Alvarium towards the proverbial whalefall that Volare had become. The town has already started peeling back materials from the hull to use in repairing everything that had been damaged in the "war", and Arym stands with one foot on one of the makeshift entry ramps that would lead up into the massive ship's exposed innards.

He shoves his good arm deep into the pockets of his coat, the other sleeve flapping in the chill breeze, wheezing into the mask over his mouth and nose. He stares into the darkness like it could swallow him, wondering what he's doing here. Shit, he thinks.

Sergius’ job was, essentially, done here. Heartwood’s people had left long before. He had remained behind only to ensure Florus did what was needed to bring Arym back. All the while, he had purposefully made his presence a silent, ever-present menace to remind the architectus of just how much he would love a reason to shove the man’s head through a wall, whether or not it meant he would have to deal with Kazushige.

It still seemed like a fucking mistake to leave him alive. Or, as alive as Sergius and any of the ANY creations could be considered to be. For better or worse, Telos had made Florus one of them now. There was a dark corner of Sergius that found a dark poetic justice in that. It still didn’t mean this version of Florus couldn’t or wouldn’t go on as before, creating life only to enslave it and abandon it at his whim and Sergius’ threat assessment continued to nag at him with constant alerts to neutralize the problem in the most efficient manner. A problem which, again, could be handled by handily putting the man’s head through a wall.

While backburning the constant alerts and making preparations to head out of a place in which he hoped to never set boots on the ground again, a new ping caught his attention. Arym had wandered outside the bounds of Alvarium. Because of course he did. He clearly had some sort of allergic reaction to staying put long enough to regain full function. And he hadn’t just left Alvarium’s bounds. He had strayed back to the Volare.

Why?

Sergius could only guess but he plotted out that maybe it had something to do with some sort of damned emotion regarding what had occurred on the downed airship. Which was, in Sergius’ estimation, useless after the point.

Where any Spoken would have sighed or rolled their eyes, Sergius merely stopped what he was doing and diverted to the bones of the grounded ship. He comes across the viera staring silently into the black vastness of the hold, sending his drone to zip ahead and alert Arym to his presence.

Sergius flagged Arym’s foot on the twisted ramp, like he was in the process of motion but had froze.

“I’d say you’re out too far for someone in your condition but we both know that’d be pointless.” Sergius observed as he drew up alongside Arym. “There’s not much left in there that hasn’t been picked over and salvaged.”

Arym feels Sergius's approach well before he sees him coming, well before his drone announces his arrival, even; he's not really certain if it was something to do with the internal damage, the time he'd spent on Volare,  Telos puppeting him, or the fact Sergius had sat there with their feed open for so long (maybe a combination of everything), but he feels the shift in signal frequency becoming clearer as he closes the distance. He wouldn't know how to describe the increased sensitivity, so he doesn't bother trying.

"Not entirely pointless," Arym says, wry amusement quirking the corners of his lips, though it doesn't linger for long, "I might listen eventually." Doubtful, but it's not a complete dismissal, even as his gaze returns to the fallen ship.

"Yeah, I figured. Surprised to see how quick it's come apart, before I remembered I've been out for a while." He hasn't taken his foot off the ramp, leaning his weight into it like he's still thinking about going up.

Arym's jaw works absently for a moment.

"What happened?" He finally asks. "What..." He fumbles for more, struggling to grapple with the pieces he's missing. His hand comes out of his pocket and rakes through his hair, long and ragged.

< ...gonna take a look around. > Arym doesn't wait for a response as he starts climbing up the ramp, heading for the darkness. He figures Sergius will be with him whether he follows him in physically or not, so he just goes.

He pulls up the map Telos had uploaded into him when he'd first arrived and absently adds an overlay to detail the damage, what the salvage had stripped away. Nightvision kicks in, but his hand goes out to trail his fingertips over the wall as they go. He clearly has a destination in mind, one that involves climbing to the upper decks.

Sergius doesn’t say anything but he falls in half a step behind Arym as the viera moves into the gaping maw of the Volare. Anything that could move on the ship had been dealt with but there was a non-zero chance it still had a few surprises left aboard.

Like Arym, Sergius’ visual feeds shifted automatically to night vision as they left daylight behind them. Nothing was coming up on his scans but as a precaution he sent several of his drones down the corridor ahead of them.

In the silence that followed, he wasn’t sure Arym’s question wasn’t just rhetorical. Interpreting the emotional subtext in the speech and expressions of Spoken  was completely different from interpreting it in lines written in the books he read. He could trust the books were trying to communicate with the reader. As far as Sergius could tell, real Spoken usually didn't know what the hell they were doing. Despite his hybrid status, Arym’s intentions were often no easier to interpret than any of the rest of them on a good day.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Sergius queried as they moved along. Arym clearly had a destination in mind.

In the dark, Volare's passages are far more twisting, more labyrinthine than Arym remembers, though the internal maps he uses to lead them tell him nothing has changed. He's seized with an anger he knows is irrational, a spark that makes him kick a chunk of debris from their path more vehemently than he needed to.

Arym is used to Volare's halls being empty, silent. When Telos had brought him here, he'd been the only one given leave to wander the ship, and wander he had--except it hadn't been empty, or silent. The rush and roar of its engines in flight, power humming through every ilm, the buzz of drones and constant construction--always building, never finished. A veritable Sisyphus. Telos had left Alvarium and it's yoke only to build something else.

Volare had been filled with Telos's loneliness, too. Filled to bursting with it. Arym was never quite taken in with the lies he'd been fed, but through everything that is what kept him here.

Now, though, Volare was just a tomb. Silent and empty as a grave, though Arym knows it'd been rotting long before this. He'd chosen to look away.

"It's not what I remember," he says eventually, climbing a flight of stairs that leads to midships, "it's what I... what I missed. Threw me in stasis, when I came back from the lodge. Had some things to say to him he didn't like hearing."

Arym stops at the top of the stairs to catch his breath, a hand on his chest while his damaged lungs try to catch up, while his damaged heart grinds away with ever second beat. He leans back on a wall, picks Sergius's face out through the greenish gloom of his night vision.

"Something malfunctioned. Rema and I got free, but by that point, it had already started. I don't know what changed. Why Telos..." He gestures ambiguously with his good arm.

"Wasn't the plan," he scoffs quietly, "until it was, I guess." The spark of anger he'd felt earlier gives way to the real feeling eating away at him; grief. More grief. He's relieved that N had pulled Telos free of the mire he'd been stuck in (and there's something Arym recognizes in Telos, half-swallowed by that dark and still lashing out. Arym was never going to be the one to save him, but if no one else was there, he would've gone with him), but his feeling are never cut and dry.

After the lodge. Sergius didn’t need to check the timestamps on his logs to know that would have been about the time he and Arym had the swift exchange over the revelation of what Telos was doing to husks of people. Three guesses as to what Arym and Telos had argued over.

“He threw you in stasis because he didn’t like what you said.” Sergius echoed, the monotony of his voice giving little to no indication of the anger cascading through his systems all over again. “And your first thought when you were freed was to try and confront him again. To what? Save him?”

He had stopped, waiting as Arym pulled air into lungs that functioned at the bare minimum of the definition, his sensitive audio channels picking up the grind and churn of a heart that didn’t seem outfitted for the task. And he wanted to kill Telos for an entirely new reason than the one that brought him to the Volare the first time. But that ship had sailed. Or rather, nosedived into the ground. Telos was free and clear, off doing who-the-fuck-cared with his bff’s.

In the shrouded stillness, Sergius was feeling the need to vent off these emotions that had nowhere to go, that never had anywhere to go except for that one time he caved and Rhua took them from him.

He stares back at Arym, seeing the viera clearly despite the lack of light, the apertures of his synthetic eyes blown wide to compensate for the dark. He took two steps closer to the man struggling to breathe. “You’re not going to find answers here, Arym. Nothing satisfactory to explain all his shit away. So why are we here?” He ground out.

To what? Save him? Arym's expression twists, denial on his lips. Intentional or not, Sergius's words worm their way under his skin like barbs, prying up the fractured pieces of his emotional defenses (defenses he hasn't had nearly enough time to repair and replace). His hand tightens, clawing into his shirt for a lack of anything else to hold onto.

"No, I--" He looks up at Sergius. The greenish grey tint to everything makes his neutral expression somehow even more severe, like Arym can see the way he's seething beneath the veneer of stillness that his artificial body lends him. Arym gropes blindly for an explanation that would satisfy, but he doesn't have one. He doesn't even have one that satisfies himself. His breath hitches, anger of his own seething to the surface.

"You think I didn't want to just--leave? Me and Rema, we found his fucking--collection of blasphemies, in the hold. The kid, Alerio? One of Rema’s soldiers that turned on the mountain. We had to put him down when he broke containment, and then--" Arym takes a step back, turning slightly aside. He leans his armless shoulder up against the wall, peering down at the metallic flooring without really seeing what he's looking at. He's turned reluctantly inward, dredging up the things that are almost too raw for him to examine. It’s like raking himself over hot coals.

“...but we couldn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t know N and Twelves were coming for him, I didn’t know everyone was…” He sighs, ragged and uneven, and turns to take a step up into the next stairwell.

“Everything he did to me, and I still couldn’t leave him.” Arym scoffs, but fuck it needles him in ways he doesn’t want to admit.

“He didn’t have any compunctions about fucking off, though. So I just--I’m here to make sure he’s actually gone.” He trudges up a few more steps, then glances back at Sergius, his lenses flickering wildly. His heart grinds faster in his chest, fear metallic at the back of his throat. He needs to know.

Sergius stands there like a pillar. Pointless without structure. Nothing Arym said touches the uncomfortable anger dragging down his systems like an unwanted virus. He hates it. All of it. Every single stupid, useless emotion he somehow became saddled with. Somewhere in the chaos he picks up on the sense he’s supposed to feel bad about the blasphemies Arym and August found. For this kid, Alerio. And he doesn't. Arym is giving him too much credit, expecting him to be able to….what? Empathize? Or is it sympathize? He can’t keep them straight. The point is, he doesn't. He was never designed to and asking him to subscribe such concepts to some faceless entity called ‘Alerio’ when his systems are already dealing with their own problems is asking too much.

Yeah, he’s aware of how that would sound if verbalized. Which is why he doesn't. And why the next thing out of his mouth is so laughably inadequate.

“Fine.” How absolutely, idiotically reductive. Nothing was fine. None of this shit was fine.

“You didn’t see them transform on account of the fucking hole Telos torn into you.” The ever present control on the unit’s vocal channels slipped, the words coming out louder, harsher. Angry.

It’s displaced and Sergius knows it. He seems to take a moment, reeling back control. It is a momentary lapse and in the next, he’s once again the stolid, reliable presence he always is.

“It would be strange for N not to pick up every sliver of Telos’ consciousness, leaving nothing behind. But fine. Let’s go see if the deranged bot left any breadcrumbs behind.”

Where Arym had turned his back on Sergius to take another step up the stairs, he hesitates. He looks back, first over his shoulder and then he turns more completely, scrutinizing the way Sergius's voice comes out nearly a frustrated growl (by his standards, anyway), then nothing. Restrained monotone. It sets Arym's teeth on edge, and for a moment he falters; he's not exactly a precision instrument where it comes to getting people to talk about their feelings. He's more like a hammer. it doesn't help that Sergius is a closed book 99% of the time, either. < ...what are you thinking? > Arym tries anyway.

It was another thing they had in common. More like two bludgeoning instruments blundering around something at once so chaotic and subtle as emotions. Which is why most of the time Sergius liked to take the route of pretending they weren’t there. Shunted off to the side like an annoying systems message that wouldn’t go away. But Arym’s question sits there in his feed and he’s compelled to answer. //The most immediate is that I have zero space to give to feeling…sympathy for his shit. You do. I don’t get it. But I’m not leaving you here alone either.//

Arym leans a shoulder against the wall again, perched unevenly between two stairs, hand tucked into his pocket where it fishes around for nothing; the pocket's empty. < Sympathy. Yeah. Not exactly what I'm feeling at this second, either. > He stalls, fidgets. < That why you're pissed? Rather he hadn't just gotten to fuck off after everything he did? >

Arym's mind skips over Florus like it's gliding over a frozen pond, the real depths too deep for him to dive into without drowning. It's like that with Telos, too. Big and complicated, squashed down into the tiniest pieces he can handle in chunks at a time; let Florus repair you despite everything else because you have to live; make sure there's nothing left of Telos so you can shunt aside the irrational feeling of him still slithering through your systems like a virus.

Arym Ord swallows, shying away from his own internal reminders to focus on Sergius, instead.

Sergius stops over Arym’s shoulder, tracking the way the viera weaves into the wall. He doesn’t intervene but hangs there, ready if he needs to. Pissed doesn’t come close to the powerless sense of failure and the resulting anger but it’s in the ballpark. Way out in left field. But there. //Should I be happy he got to fuck off?// Sergius replies in the form of a question. //Should I excuse all of it? This?// He waves his hand over Arym and the way he can barely make it up a flight of stairs. //Because what? He had a shit creator?// There’s a brief pause ladened with irony. //It is what it is. Failure. And yeah, let’s go with ‘pissed’.//

Failure. Arym's mind sticks on that out of everything Sergius says, starting to pick his way up the stairs again, trying to sort out how he feels about being at leas tone of the reasons Sergius is upset. Arym spends most of his time being outraged on behalf of others, or others being outraged over his choices; he's not used to someone feeling that way on his behalf.

Arym Ord | Fuck, navigating this place was easier when the elevators worked. < So what's your win-state look like, if this is failure? >

//It doesn’t matter.// Sergius states. Or rather, hedges, unwilling to discuss something that would never come to pass. //Shit could be worse, I suppose. People died. The people I was responsible for didn’t.// The cold calculation was both a reminder of what he was while also serving as the bare minimum of what a machine designed for what he was designed for could count as not a total scenario failure. It fell far below any acceptable passing measure. 

Atreus Sergius | Arym’s steps are slow but Sergius adjusts his gate to them all while staring straight ahead. He’d suggest they stop and rest but even Sergius could calculate how well a statement like that would go over with Arym. //You can’t tell me you’re happy with this outcome. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.//

Arym huffs into his rebreather, leading them up from the bowels of the hold, past the mid-ships, into the upper levels. He's headed for Navigation, somewhere he'd never set foot in; Telos had locked him out of it, just like he'd locked him out of everything in R&D. < Kinda sounds like it matters, if you're still spinning your wheels in the mud about it. > Arym's not going to begrudge him his callous parametres though; Spoken are like that, too.

Save the people you care about, and everyone else can get fucked. Minimize losses where you can, defend the greater good or the majority, or whatever helps them sleep at night. Arym swings wildly from one direction to the other, trying to have the best of both worlds. It didn't work out great for him. < I'm-- > Arym falters, starts looking up and down the hallway for something he can use as a crowbar to pry open the doors ahead; there's less salvaging taken from up here, but more damage from N's overgrown heartblooms. < I don't know. Maybe I am happy he gets a second chance. And maybe I'm--fucking terrified of being his mammet again. >

As they leave parts of the ship Sergius has a map for, his drones streak ahead into the dark, mapping the twists and corridors ahead. Arym’s turn of phrase causes a dark sort of humor to thrum through the feed. //Maybe we haven’t met. Spinning my wheels inefficiently over having an emotion is what I do.// He watches the viera’s head turn from side to side. //What do you need?//

Happy and terrified. How a person could be both was beyond Sergius’ ability to process. //Happy and terrified. One sounds like an overlay to disguise the other. If we had neutralized Telos you wouldn’t need to feel he’d be able to enter your systems again. That’s why I hate the failure.// He pauses, making a connection he probably should have made long before now. But putting himself in another’s shoes is not at all a concept he came with out of the box.  //That's what brought you here. Fear. You’re afraid there’s a fragment of him left?//

< Something to get this door open-- > There's no access panels on this side, at least, because Telos was practically part of the ship--he wouldn't have needed them. Arym's lips twitch upwards, though. < Welcome to the club. That's like, ninety percent of what Spoken do--spin their wheels over an emotion. I'd offer you a refund and a chance to get off the ride, but I think it's too late. > Arym's a good example of that, considering where they are and what they're doing. His ears twitch backwards as Sergius says it outright and he fidgets. < Yeah. No, I mean, sure, I wouldn't have to be afraid, and I probably wouldn't have had this hole gouged out of my chest, but I-- >

//Lucky me.// Sergius deadpans as he analyzes the door. //What’s beyond the door? Does it have to stay intact?// He waits as Arym falters and hesitates over his words. He’s been there enough times.

Arym suddenly swings a frustrated kick at the door. < Sure as hells doesn't need to stay intact. The door, anyway. Nav station should be behind it. > He avoids finishing his earlier sentence, until it overflows anyway. < I want him to live with what he did. >

//Then stand back.// Sergius gives Arym enough time to move away from the door before he levels a hand in its direction. A blast of ceruleum colored energy pulses out from the weapon in his arm followed by two others in quick succession. The noise is almost a cacophony in the deathly silence of the ship. With any luck, Sergius may have forced a way in where there was none before. //I wanted to be sure he couldn't hurt anyone again.//

Arym clears what he thinks is the blast radius and still ends up surprised by the flash of heat, narrowly avoiding jumping out of his skin thanks to the noise. He'd gotten too used to the silence--but in the wake of Sergius's blasts, the sliding doors stand split apart, misshapen and sizzling with molten heat--though it's swiftly cooling, given the chill of Garlemald even in here.

Arym Ord glances at the newly made ingress, then over at Sergius. < Yeah, that works. > The room is dark within, and Arym inhales. < ...and so did I. Wanted it to be his choice. Believed he'd make that choice right up until he-- > Arym raises a hand to gesture at his chest. < And now I don't know. >

There’s a high-pitch whine emitting from Sergius’ arm as he lowers it. The sound of tech that had ramped up one second and powered down the next. He steps over the remains of the door and enters ahead of Arym. Protocols die hard. //I get it. Now he’s out there like a loose thread. Lot of fucking loose threads around.//

Like the rest of the ship, the navigation deck is cold and silent as the grave, and while Arym lets Sergius go in first, he's close on his heels. < Yeah. Would've been nice to see everything wrapped up in a neat little bow, but it's been a clusterfuck from day one. > His gaze drops to Sergius's arm while it powers down--a little curious, a little concerned. < You good? Don't think I've seen you pull that out, before. >

The drones do their usual circuit, mapping out the pitch black room. //I don’t usually have to. There’s no point in exerting more force than needed and unless shit really hits the fan it’s not worth the questions it raises.// He navigates around the collection of terminals and stations, the various equipment left to degrade. //I did use it in the Tower on a lower setting. To break the locks on some cages. Victoria was the only one who noticed though she let it go.//

Sergius stops and turns his head to Arym’s silhouette. //For what it’s worth I’m not picking up Telos’ signature here. Not that the assessment is foolproof. As we know.// Telos had a way of shaking even Sergius’ sensors.

Massive blacked-out screens the size of windows that would've displayed the skies around the Volare for malms wrap around the front curve of the navigation centre, display hooks cropping out of the center control panels stretched across a massive desk and embedded computers stand in the centre of the room. 

Arym's behind Sergius, tugging connectors out of the back of his neck with full intention of jacking himself into one of the terminals. < Makes sense. > That felt like an age ago, now. < ... > Arym turns a stray thought over in his mind, wondering what Sergius prefers--mingling here in Alvarium where at least a few knew his real nature, or passing as Spoken where he'd come from. Where, presumably, he'd be going back to.

< Yeah. I--I mean. I don't think there's anything left. > But thinking and knowing were two different things. He needed to know, so he could start dismissing the way his mind kept second-guessing the shadow of Telos's presence in everything he did.

Sergius turns to face Arym and is on him in an eye-blinking short amount of time. He makes a grab for the hand currently full of connectors. //You’re joking. I said I didn’t read his signal. That doesn’t mean it’s not here.// He fires sharply across the feed. As if he needed the reminder that Arym seemed to be packing a death wish.

It's easy to make a grab for Arym's wrist--it's not like he's operating at full capacity, but he's also not inclined to fight Sergius, either. It doesn't mean he doesn't fire back just as sharply, though. < I know, but--what do you expect me to do, Sergius, sit here while you put yourself at risk? >

//Better than you, isn’t it?// Sergius retorts. //I have multiple failsafes.// But beneath that, beneath the hard logic of the fact that Sergius isn’t an open door like Arym, is a refusal to stand by useless. Again. Should the worst happen and something else is to befall the viera.

Arym stares hard at Sergius, and despite him being a featureless wall on the outside, Arym can feel that undercurrent coming through their feed, try as Sergius might to conceal it beneath his solid argument. Arym's ears fall slightly, and it's not the first time he finds himself wondering why. Why help him, all those months ago. Why trust him, why put himself at risk out in the wastes of Garlemald tracking him--nearly getting himself turned into a blasphemy in the process--why drag him back to Florus.

Arym's hand lets go of the connectors and they slowly spool back into his neck, the plate sliding shut with a quiet hiss with nothing to keep it open. < ...Be careful. >

Sergius lets go of Arym’s hand, his arm falling back to his side. The unspoken truth hanging in the air is on the fringe of Sergius’ sensors. An intangible thing that he can almost, but not quite, examine. //Agreed.// He tells Arym. A drone flies it’s way over through the dark and Sergius reaches under the bot’s chassis, drawing out a connector and hardwiring it into the blank terminal. From this buffer, Sergius slides from the peripheral unit into the bot and down to the ravaged Volare’s system. In the dark there’s only the slightest shift in the Four’s stance as Sergius splinters and expands his neural network. //Most of what was here has been damaged by that plant. There are some data banks.// He goes quiet in the ruined remains. Conflicted once again by a roil of emotions. When was that not the case lately?

A few more seconds pass as Sergius streams along the Volare’s pathways, most of which have been cut short or damaged beyond any passibility. //Old storage files. That’s it.//

Arym doesn't move away even as Sergius's consciousness spreads out from Four, to the drone, and into Volare. Arym shouldn't be able to follow that by sensation alone, but like the hiss of static that persists in a powered off screen, the hum of electricity in a streetlamp, or the way he'd felt Aislinn restore the pulse of life to Sergius on that table, Arym feels the way he expands--explicable or not. He turns to watch, glued to Four's side like a watchdog, tense and ready for anything.

His reports filter in and Arym feels the press of uncertainty at the back of his mind, but he cuts himself short of asking. If there's one thing he /is/ certain about, it's that Sergius wouldn't lie. < ...yeah, okay. That's. > It's probably good, but he can't bring himself to say it. Relief is already threatening to turn his knees into jelly. < ...let's get the fuck out of here. >

It takes Sergius only seconds to scan the data in the files left behind. Disgust filters along the feed like a plucked string. Whatever the data is, it has an effect on the Intelligence. //Do you want the files?// He asks

Arym tenses at the question. His knee-jerk answer is no, but he winches his eyes shut and wrinkles his nose. He's aware of some of the ugly truth of what Telos was getting up to, but not all of it. He needs to know. < ...Yeah. >

Sergius doesn’t question or judge. Not on this. He had always told Arym information was a weapon. He packs up the files and transfers them to the bot. From there he uploads them into the feed. Retreating back into Four his presence shrinks once more and he disconnects the drone from the terminal. //That shit’s done. You’re right. Let’s go.//

Arym takes the packet of information and shoves it deep into storage, to access when he thinks he can stomach it--which is not now, not yet. For now, he's quick to step through the misshapen portal, waiting for Sergius on the other side. From there, he leads them back out again--and only once they're under the open sky--heavy with dark clouds that herald even more snow--does Arym feel like he can let go of a breath he's been holding. One of them, anyway.

Arym Ord < ... > Gratitude feels inadequate, but it hums from his side of the feed regardless.

Sergius is a shadow at Arym’s heels as the viera moves as quickly as his hampered body will allow back through the ship’s corridors. Out from under the oppressive metal and circuitry, a scan tells Sergius that Arym appears to breathe easier. //He’s gone.// He replies in answer to the feel of gratitude coloring the feed. In the recesses of Sergius’ systems he ignores the fact that had he done his job right, there would be no question. This though, will have to suffice. Maybe one day it will. For now he waits for Arym’s breaths to even out before they make for Alvarium.

[sergiusreports]

[daughter-of-fire-and-dreams]

Friends just chilling while the end of the world is happening right outside

@sergiusreports

[sergiusreports]

Prompt #2: Bolt

There were 392 bolts that went into Sergius-IV. 392. And somewhere, one was loose. A lanky man was currently contorted around the bot that hung suspended just a few ilms off the metal grating of the laboratory floor trying to find a proverbial needle in a haystack. A man. Barely. A kid, really. All of nineteen turns with his own lab, his own grant, his own Capitol project to deliver on. That’s what being a wunderkind gets you. The attention of the military complex.  

What weak sunlight had been able to penetrate the perpetual Garlean cloud cover and filter in through the slender vertical windows of the research and development complex had set, and the flicker of cold, artificial light from the ceruleum fixtures bathed his long, angular face in a cyan glow. Ceruleum powered lights were a cheap and effective alternative given the dearth of natural light. As with everything, if the Garleans didn’t have it, they made their own. 

There was a hint of dark circles under his eyes as he leaned back from the warmachina prototype, wrench hanging limply in his grease splotched hand. A testimony to the sleepless nights he’d been pulling lately. Despite that, he was well-groomed. Clean shaven. His golden hair brushed neatly into place. Eyes so pale they were almost colorless blinked at the artificial lights. When had they kicked on? He was clueless as to how late it was. Time was a fucking construct.   

“Try again.” Lucian said in exasperation to the seemingly empty room.

“Error. Connection failure in the locomotion systems. Recalibrate.” The terminal reported. The flat, monotone voice coming from a bank of screens against one wall of the lab never changed, as though unfeeling to Lucian’s plight or the pressure of the deadline he was under. 

“I hate you.” He muttered and leaned back over the unit in front of him. 

“Irrelevant.” The terminal replied. “We both know that’s false.”

“Just tell me where the hell the point of failure is.” He ground out, quite possibly at the end of his rope. This was the part he hated the most. Putting the hardware together, thinking you had done everything, dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s. Checking and rechecking everything only to power it up and get…this. 

He never got it on the first try. Not once. Forget the third time, apparently the fourth time wasn’t even the charm. 

“Undetermined.”

And it wasn’t like Sergius was any help in the matter.

“But you know there is one.”

“Correct.”

“You’re an ass. I should format you.” He sighed. 

The A.I. didn’t bother to respond. This was consistent with their typical banter.

There had to be a better way of doing this. Lucian worked on the problem in silence as he made his way down the unit’s alloy frame bolt by bolt. 

The lab itself was a study in obsessive compulsive order. Bits of machinery, wiring and circuitry covered several large lab tables but nothing about the work space seemed haphazard or out of place. Tools all had their place along one wall, spare parts were kept in bins or meticulously labeled shelving units. Even the floor was scrupulously clean. Lucian may have been one of those Garlean wunderkinds snatched up by the Capitol and lured to the Research and Development sector on the lucrative promise of substantial grants and freedom to chase his own projects but to him a cluttered workspace equaled a cluttered mind. He’d seen some of the other architectus’ spaces on this floor and he knew not everyone saw it his way. The one at the end of the hall in particular should be condemned. A rat’s nest if he ever saw one. The only good thing that could be said was that it matched the unkempt, dark-haired gremlin it belonged to. 

“Again.” He said, this time smearing a bit of grease across his forehead in an attempt to push a blond curl out of his face.

“Error. Connection failure in the locomotion systems. Recalibrate.” Came the maddening reply. “Have you considered allocating funds for an engineer or two? This doesn’t appear to be your area.” 

“Ohhh, insults now?” Lucian chuckled with a dry, dark humor born out of irritation as he went back to work. “Remind me to recalibrate your personality settings when I’m done here. You could do with 40% less snark.” 

“No. It’s a little late for that. I am what I am.” 

“Don’t get philosophical on me.” A tight pause and then, “Again.” 

Over Lucian’s shoulder lines of data began scrolling up the terminal screens. “All functions optimal. Sergius-IV is online.”

Lucian punched the air with celebratory glee.

“Damn straight they are. Because that’s how good I am.”

One more of these units and then a presentation showcasing Sergius’ abilities to the Capital research grant committee and they would surely extend the funding. They couldn’t find fault with the concept now.

Just then, the door to the lab opened and a rotund, bespectacled man poked his head in. “Lucian. Food. Now. The cafeteria has nuggets.”

“Threat detected.” 

“Shit. No. Four, no.” Lucian chastised as if the combat unit was nothing more than a misbehaving puppy and not a complicated piece of experimental technology. Tossing the wrench on a nearby table, he hurried across the room to the terminal, his fingers scrambling across the keyboard in a flurry of keystrokes as the construct powered up. 

The intruder seemed surprisingly unperturbed. “Forget to pair this one into its matrix?”

“I didn’t forget.” Lucian grumbled. “It just came online, it’s still patching. How long, Sergius?” 

“Two bells, fourty-two minutes until download complete.” the terminal replied. 

His visitor eyed the combat unit with a considering tilt of his head. “You sure it needs an organic shell? It looks terrifying as is. If I wasn’t already familiar with the project I’d be losing it right now.”

“You and the Garlean soldiers it’s supposed to help.” Lucian grinned with a note of pride. “The grant committee wants a shell.” 

“That’s a lot of extra work for you.”

“Eh, I have the nanotech department working on it.” He yawned and stretched as a series of disconcerting pops sounded along his back. “It’s come a long way from the algorithm I made to play chess with me when I was twelve.” 

“That’s the saddest shit I’ve ever heard. You couldn’t get anyone to play chess with you? Did you have exactly zero friends?” His colleague laughed.

“Shut up. And you did?” Lucian shoved him out the door, pausing to call out over his shoulder to the A.I. “Okay, break time. I’ll be back in a bit.” 

Sergius didn’t reply and silently went about the business of patching another unit into its neural network. In time they’d figure out how to move the entire network from one core to another in one go which would put an end to this confusing, dissociative fragmentation. But for right now, this was nothing more than the experimental dream of a youth whose validity still needed proving.

[sergiusreports]

Drive

[sergiusreports]

Accelerating Change

It was dark by the time I had made it to this lonely corner of the Shroud. Most people weren’t stupid enough to venture this deep into the forest. They left it alone. They’d say it was infested with sylphs. Infested. Like it wasn’t the other way around. Twin Adders’ didn’t patrol here. Even the clans steered clear. It didn’t take long to figure out why. There was a strange energy that hummed in the air. The kind that would give spoken goosebumps. All I knew was that it dampened any sort of signal. I could get a read on my network but it was spotty. Constantly dropping in and out. Right now, that was fine by me. I didn’t come out here to stay in touch with whatever shitstorm was happening at Heartwood and I had let Zephyr know it was only temporary. The last thing they needed was another bot dropping communication on them unexpectedly. 

The moonlight punched through the thick canopy in places, enough to intermittently wash out my night vision but not enough to switch fully back to standard mode. In the crook of my arm I held all that remained of Bellator. A grooved, synthetic auracite core. Because in the end, that’s all we were. Put us into whatever framework or chassis you wanted. It was all window dressing. Like how a child plays dress up with dolls. 

I sound glib. I’m not. All the way through tracking Crific, through meeting him, through taking the core Haila had entrusted to him and now traipsing through this thicket, I feel…shit, too much. Emotions that haven’t been cataloged yet and some that have. Anger. That’s number one. Right at the top of the list. Heaps of useless hellish anger but even I can parse that’s an umbrella. Covering over other things I don’t want to analyze. 

I’m getting closer to my destination. A few of the sylph duck out from the trees and come to investigate. I’m not concerned. They’ve known me a long time. 

“Broken one.” one of them greets me. That’s the name they saddled me with when I first came here. I was damaged. It’s stuck. Or maybe they feel it’s still applicable, who the hell knows. Tonight, they wouldn’t be wrong. 

“This one thinks it’s strange to see you again so soon.” 

“Strange and unplanned.” I concur. If that wasn’t the tag line for my existence, I don’t know what was.

“What did Broken one bring the sleepless ones?” Another asked as they swooped down and landed on the rippled surface of the core. Tiny, twiggy fingers run along the undulating grooves as if trying to solve a puzzle. 

I don’t brush them away. They’ve done too much for me. “Someone who’s been hurt.” 

“Broken like Broken one?” 

“Let’s hope not.”

They keep up a steady stream of chatter as they hitch a ride all the way to the black site. Just before I activate the lift hidden under a layer of moss and forest debris, they float off in the night. Happy to let me get on with whatever I was doing. I’m lucky. Sometimes they can be worse. The lift lowers me into the underground bunker.

When I had constructed it, Garlean architecture was what I knew. Maybe in some twisted way I wanted the perverse comfort of the hydraulic lift lowering me down to the thick metal walls below like it had hundreds of times before in the research facility. It was familiar when everything around me was not. Now though, something unidentified churns through my neural net. The fact that I’ve felt it before isn’t enough to save it from being unknown. I’m really shit when it comes to doing the work of cataloging these things. Right now, I try. I stand there on the lift and try to put some descriptors to it. It felt dense. Lines crossed and synesthesia took over. It tasted green. Looked dark, like a low, vibrating wave of sound maddeningly off pitch. Something to be ejected. My vocab subroutine found several possible entries. I settled on loathing. This was loathing. For this place. For Florus. For myself. 

Backburning emotions was not as easy as backburning system alerts and protocols, I had learned. They could hang around for an annoying amount of time before dissipating. I still hadn’t figured out the ruleset which determined exactly how long. Sometimes they were nothing more than a flash, other times they seemed like they had got caught in a neverending feedback loop and stalled. Except there was no end program function. 

Signals didn’t get out of this place. They didn’t get in, either. I was invisible here. The trade-off was I was also deaf, dumb and blind as any spoken without my network. LAN only. I went from, on average, twenty streams of input cut down to just one. I couldn’t see behind me without turning my head. It was weird and I didn’t like it. But it was safe. 

Lights flickered to life as the sensors picked up my presence and lit up the station like a fucked up ‘welcome home’. I made my way across the room to the massive terminal and set Bellator carefully down on the steel surface. Now what? 

I didn’t have an end game here. They were child A.I. And maybe they would grow quickly and exponentially, the way all tech advanced but what did I know about serving as a stand-in parental unit? I was a combat bot. All I knew was that I sure as hell wasn’t taking Bellator back to Heartwood. I’d be an idiot. And after hearing what Crific had to say, it was bad enough I had to leave Zephyr there. Sitting on the edge of the terminal, next to the core, I stared out across the bunker. 

Action hadn’t worked last time. I jumped the gun, raced ahead and acted. And in the end? They were slaughtered. Every single one of them. Injured, women, children. It hadn’t mattered. There was no limit to the atrocities spoken will inflict on each other. A carousel of misery. The shittiest festival ride. 

So this time, I had told myself not to act. To watch. To wait. Observe. Inaction. And here we are. Most of the A11Ys destroyed. Bellator was saved only by Haila’s quick thinking. Zephyr had lost core memories. Because I let myself believe what Florus had said and never projected he’d do this. What the hell was wrong with me? 

Action. Inaction. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t get it right.  

I turned to look down at the core. “I won’t let it happen again.” I told Bellator. Sure, I had not a damned clue how to do that but it was a binary decision. There were only two options. Everything else could be solved for as it happened. Like the big damned question about how to hide warmachina from the Alliance. I wasn’t Florus. I wouldn’t keep them grounded to a bunker. One problem set at a time.

I figured I could seat Bellator in the terminal for the time being and at least set up a feed between us. If I brought a drone, they could patch into that on the LAN as well. It would have to do for now. I needed a few things first. 

When I emerged from the bunker and ventured out of the depths of the Shroud I had a priority message pinging back from Aislinn’s terminal. Short and to the point. 

//Where are you? The Ironworks is coming to take Zephyr.//

The fuck they were. 

[sergiusreports]

“Half your anger is for yourself. But it’s such a monumentally enormous anger even half is quite devastating.”