2024-09-21: The Dethroning of Pain
- Log: The Dethroning of Pain
- Cast: Sympatria Unit, Yuliana Kafim, Elisa Kafim
- Where: Choir, Mongolia
- Date: 0099 09 21 (OOCly 2024-09-26)
- Summary: Yuliana, stark raving mad, still manages to keep One from bleeding out -- but in order to fix him, she calls her wife. Elisa proceeds to minister aid to One, as he, Six, and Three get to see Yuliana's madness and Elisa's strange proficiency. Yuliana learns that Elisa's mind control can be used to prosocial ends, and Elisa learns that some humans can detach their heads and spin them around. Both of these are very dangerous lessons... but surely the cyborgs revealing their allergies won't be dangerous. They're allies, after all!
<Pose Tracker> Sympatria Unit has posed.
IT'S BEEN A LITTLE WHILE.
The group had to get to where they were going. Then they had to unload things. Throughout, the so called BRC-1 "Pain of the Universe" had remained operational. Mostly because the core block and the legs hadn't taken much damage.
Once they had gotten close enough, some cross-talk had wheedled Pain of the Universe to come close enough for Sympatria #6 to leap over. She had taken the medical kit, somewhat battered and with stuff no doubt out of date, but enough to do SOMETHING.
It's been a few hours since then. Perhaps a day, depending on how you slice it.
The Pain of the Universe has remained standing in the open air. (Where else are you gonna park your robots here? They don't even have a swimming pool to put the robots under!) After getting his cargo parked and unloaded, Sympatria #3 had moved in that direction as well. After about forty minutes, the Pain of the Universe shifted to standby mode. Six went and wheeled up a portable stairwell.
There is now most of a personal-scale tent - again a thing stolen from the Geara Doga's crash kit, too small perhaps to serve much for refugees - which has been assembled over the shattered, contorted spaces of the Pain of the Universe's cockpit. The portable stairwell has remained in place, allowing easy access to people who do not have cyborg legs.
Climb the stairwell, perhaps with some announcement. Be greeted by the sight of light coming in through the dun-brown nylon of the tent, stretched out as it is. The top of the stairwell, with its 1.5mx3m space, is currently occupied primarily by Six, who is squatting and looking at the horizon. She has also obtained a cigarette from somewhere and seems to be posing scenically with it. Perhaps she does not actually know how cigarettes work.
One remains plugged into the cockpit. Somewhat amateurish gauze has been applied to the side of his face, concealing one eye. The other eye is closed. He does not seem to be in pain, although his left arm is gone (blown up) and one of the two shrapnel impacts to his leg hasn't been removed, although it has apparently been packed with gauze. The machine-scent is mixed with hospital-scent, with a faint undertone of spoiling meat.
(It is not clear where Three is. Maybe he went to the bathroom? Or to get food, water? Surely they're entitled to a meal after all of this. Maybe even one each. Maybe *two* each... *and* dessert.)
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Four hours from the convoy getting back to Choir, Yuliana's been busy. Apparently, she's certified as a field medic from her black ops days -- and with the medics at camp occupied with an outbreak of disease in the cramped and unsuitable conditions, she ended up being the best person to stop One from bleeding out.
That's why the gauze is so amateurish. Listen, he's not dead, is he?
She's been -- off -- the whole time. Stranger than she normally is. She keeps saying that One is 'seeking truth', and urging him not to 'discard his lies as yet'. She hasn't hurt him, but it's hard to argue she's all there.
For instance: it takes her four hours to realise that she should just call her wife.
"The lies are becoming worn here," she says, over the phone. "A noble sacrifice in this feigned existence. I put a rock in the river, but the water's still coming out. The mud stinks, now. It's -- no -- no, the water isn't that. It's still wrong. You'll come, won't you?"
She's... helping.
<Pose Tracker> Elisa Kafim has posed.
A little while!
Elisa Kafim can do first aid, but it's not necessarily recommended. She can do better care than that still. Whether it is recommended or not is an exercise left to the reader.
"I will come," Elisa says to Yuliana, hearing her voice. The lines are worn, and the water is coming out...
Hmm.
Elisa steps out of a portal that appears in a flash of wrongness to the Awakened, a black and green thing of Power. She walks from that portal to the cockpit, floating up towards it and opening the hatch in silence.
"My Yuliana," she says. "This is the injured party?"
She looks to her wife, thoughtful, and then back to One.
"I will extract you from this cockpit, and heal your wounds. Your assistance is appreciated in this matter, and it shall be rewarded with the salvation of your life."
She will probably use the stairs on the way down. Probably.
"Then, I shall attend to my wife. Come, I will carry you."
<Pose Tracker> Sympatria Unit has posed.
One is not dead! He is asleep.
The distinction has some subtleties. Six had overseen what Yuliana did at the time, and had reported that he was using his sleep inducer. She was not eager to unfasten him from Pain of the Universe; apparently, it's supporting his onboard Pain Editor.
One had been conscious for at least the first part, and had mostly said tough-sounding reassuring things once he had been informed that he was not leaking his brains out of his skull without realizing it.
BUT NOW
A portal opens! Six turns her head and stares.
She snaps upright. "Right!" she says. To Elisa, she explains, "He's sleeping. Lemme wake him up." It is literally two steps over; she pulls a wire out of the heel of her palm and plugs it into some anonymous part of the pilot's throne of this machine.
One groans. His unwrapped eye opens. "Uh?" he says, sounding weak.
"She's a doctor," Six informs him.
One's singular visible eye takes in what stands before him. "Oh," he continues, more cogently. "Where's Three?"
"He's in the toilet," Six explains. After this she starts reaching over and unplugging -- things. There's a lot of cabling involved.
While his sister(?) leans all around him, One says to Elisa and Yuliana, "... Thanks... We made it, right? It got kind of... blurry after the Sabers got away. I was kinda..."
A long pause.
"... I dunno," One continues. "It's kind of crazy I lived through all that, right? Like you guys are real, right? Six, you'd tell me if this was a sim. Say something stupid."
"Excuse me, I do not say anything stupid," Six informs him.
"Yeah you do." "DON'T" This seems to satisfy One.
One does say, "So, uh... I still have this -- thing here... I still have some meat in the leg." (Yuliana no doubt found and reported this. The foreign object is preventing bleeding for now.) "... I'm not sure I can w"
"She'll carry you! She said before you woke up," is the SIX INTERRUPTION. "Are you gonna take him through that portal?" Six asks Elisa, before telling Yuliana, "That portal was great." Back to Elisa. "Is it to Hell or something?"
"Hell isn't real," One complains, weakly.
(In the distance, Three can be seen, skip-jogging his way back towards the Pain of the Universe.)
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
The toilets are the portable kind you bring in on a truck. They're not great, but they're something.
"With me -- it's mine -- Elya," Yuliana gets there in the end, though she's vague as she first turns to Elisa. "Yes. He got in the way. They wanted to destroy it all in the spirit of truth, but the lies bring them comfort. He didn't let it happen. So I wouldn't let him go. Can you block him from actuality? He's leaking," she says, as she points to his leg. "There. I plugged it up, but the hole was made by a spear, and the spear will make a bigger hole."
Which is to say: she left the foreign body in the wound to stop him from bleeding out even faster and more dramatically. Six will have observed that the things Yuliana are doing all make sense, from a first aid perspective, even if her words often don't.
And when Six wakes One, Yuliana smiles. "The story's still told. They're eating, now. It isn't real, but they're happy, anyway. It's the best you can do in a world stretched over a gravestone. Blind yourself a little longer."
He might be in a sim. The AI is clearly glitching! Yuliana wasn't this mad when the mission started.
"The portal leads to the Void," Yuliana explains, to Six. "Do you hear its call? There's nothing there. There's nothing here, but we pretend so well. All built on dead gardens, they died long ago. We forgot we were dead. Don't you remember?"
So, it might be Hell.
<Pose Tracker> Elisa Kafim has posed.
Asleep, and impaled. Elisa considers the matter of impalement for a moment with a reptilian gaze. But One is awake, and that is good enough. As is Yuliana's response. "I see," she says to Yuliana. "I can keep him in this world. ...Without a change to his nature." That last part is very important. Because Elisa could do it the other way...
Six is doing a lot of unplugging. "You made it," she confirms. "I was watching. This is not a simulation, though..."
The portal. Hmmm.
"No. I will not take him through the portal, for She who dwells within might take him. I will go through this world's air, instead." A pause. "It is like enough to Hell for your purposes, I think. You could help to reign there if you chose. But right now, it would be the path to a swift and painful demise."
"This will be painful," Elisa says, and rips out the 'spear' with her bare hand. Then, she passes her hand over One's wound--and green-black material knits over it. "it will not change you," she reassures him. "But it will hold in the blood until I can suture the wound properly."
Yuliana is... glitching. Hmm.
"It is good that the mission was successful. Come."
Elisa walks down the stairway, carrying One, towards a table.
<Pose Tracker> Sympatria Unit has posed.
One turns his head a little to look at Yuliana. He blinks, though at the moment it's hard to distinguish from a wink.
Six - who had a little disputation on this matter before realizing that Yuliana's *concepts* were sound despite the differences in nomenclature - nods at her. "Oh, so it's like that. Now I understand everything."
^-- doesn't get it at all
But then Elisa approaches. One's head turns to watch her - she's approaching the side where his eye is bound up. He watches... she grips hold of it... and LO! LET SHE WHO DRAWS THE SHRAPNEL FROM THE CYBORG BE RIGHTWISE QUEEN OF --
There's a squelching noise, which is horrible, but then the green-black something-or-other binds over his upper thigh.
"Huh," One says. "I felt that a little. Weird."
"HEY ARE YOU GUYS COOL UP THERE?" calls Three, swiftly approaching.
"DR. KAFIM JUST PULLED THAT BIG PIECE OUT OF ONE," shouts back Six. Then she says to One, "I'm pulling the PE cable now. You ready?"
One nods once.
The cable comes out.
One stares into the world with his single bare eye as the 92% of pain editing being done by the BRC is removed, leaving him with only his onboard sensorium and its smaller, less robust pain editor (lower-powered - you have to basically rectify out the pain signals, even if you recognize them) abruptly.
The differential makes him scream. It goes on for about four seconds before abruptly stopping with a wheeze. Six reaches over and wipes his head with a clean but often-laundered cloth, without words.
Rapid footsteps as Three starts climbing the stairs. But he can see Elisa coming, and she's carrying One. Who, of course, is pretty heavy - but not as heavy as he could have been, since his left arm is blown off to the shoulder. Though, the socket it rested in seemed entirely prosthetic, so that's not *urgent*... and his right arm is fine.
(It may be useful to note the relative sizes here. One seems to be the tallest of the Sympatriae seen so far - call him 6'2". Three is about 5'7". Six is about 5'4".)
"Did you poop?" Six calls down to Three.
"Why?" Three calls back.
"Did you sanitize your hands?!"
"Yes," Three says, with a tone of aggravation. Three speaks to Elisa, then, but it's brief. "Thanks. Uh. I can tell you his like, augmentation plot, it's kinda bespoke."
To Yuliana, Six confides, "I use glucose cartridges and a mineral scavenger. I don't have to poop." She moves to follow after Elisa, though not closely.
"If you need to replace the immune chip or something, uh, he should have two but it's possible they both SIX STOP TELLIN PEOPLE ABOUT YOUR POOPING uh that they both fried out, ma'am."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana nods, gravely serious, to Six. She Gets It. What a relief!
"They'd like that," Yuliana says, to her wife, and pauses: "I think." Maybe One does want his nature changed! Nothing matters, so becoming an abomination unto Earth doesn't, either!
Which also explains why she's still here in camp in her pilot suit which clearly shows the tentacles, even though she's supposed to be in hiding out here.
"Oh, no, it is," Yuliana corrects her wife, cheerfully. "In a manner with speaking. Simulation, simulacra, theatre, literature..." Her wife is glitching. That's probably fine. "But it's the same story it was when you started," she adds, comfortingly(?), to Six. "We've not begun a different play."
She watches Elisa remove the 'spear' -- it's not that long -- and remarks, to One: "You felt it? You don't feel much. Another editing pass. The story's refined. Did this slip through the process?" She doesn't bat an eye at what keeps the blood in; that's very normal.
At least she's absorbed something of Six's explanation of the Pain Editor and why One had to stay plugged in, then. And so: screaming. "Ahh--!!" Yuliana yelps, just the same, clapping her hands over her ears. Why is the pain noise so loud?! It's going to give her a headache!
"You're done?" She asks, tightly, after his stop-to-a-wheeze.
And she blinks, and turns to Six, and says: "Oh, so they made you for long-term insertions. They don't like functions getting in the way of sniper pits. Did they get rid of sleeping, too?" That's -- well, she's talking like it's a totally normal thing, but with the way she's talking...
Yuliana makes her way down the stairs, after her wife. She doesn't, strictly speaking, need to use the stairs, but she just feels kind of unsteady on her feet. Dazed by the screaming, maybe. It's fine.
<Pose Tracker> Elisa Kafim has posed.
Yuliana corrects her wife! That's unusual enough that Elisa watches her. She understands quickly what she means. They have not begun a different play... "Yes," she says. "We are in the same story as before."
Six understands? Maybe. But Elisa is the rightful Queen of... something, and that horrible squelching noise doesn't bother her very much. "You are not accustomed to pain?" Elisa inquires. The PE cable... Hmmm. He screams. Elisa doesn't flinch. She doesn't move, other than to watch him thoughtfully until he's done. Yuliana asks if he is done, and Elisa says, "Interesting." Elisa does not have any trouble lifting One, even considering how much bigger he is than she. He may as well be made of feathers, for all the difficulty she has. The questions of poop, however...
"Please refrain from screaming close to my wife," Elisa instructs politely. Then, "None of you are sanitized enough for what is about to happen. But that will change."
"Yes, tell me of his augmentations. I must know if I need work around them."
She sets One down, eventually, but not before conjuring a table of blackest crystal--no, she just calls one over telekinetically from across the way. That's sufficient. She reinforces it with a little energy and sets One atop it.
"This will be uncomfortable."
Elisa sterilizes the area by killing all the microbes that aren't convenient to her. Don't worry about it. It feels tingly!
"Now, once I have guidance as to your body's requirements, I will suture the wound."
"Sleep is... useful, at times."
<Pose Tracker> Sympatria Unit has posed.
"Voltage... it didn't... I knew it was bad but... wow, ugh," One mutters to reply to Yuliana as he is princess-carried down.
"hmmmmmm," Six answers Yuliana. "Kind of? I mean we kind of had a lot of input but I know Eight's the same way, like, abdominally. She's more of a sniper, I'm more of a... I don't know what to call it. I just use the parasite pack to take over stuff. Normally," she continues, gesturing at the hulking Pain of the Universe, "NORMALLY like, Three COULD plug into it, for instance, because the cables have similarity, but he could just make it walk around. But I use the parasite pack and in PRINCIPLE I could take over completely."
"But I'm not going to do that to One," Six says piously.
"Also the sleep inducer's mostly to help since it's sorta hard without it," she says. "We actually got really paranoid on Earth for a while and staggered it so one of us was always awake? But I mean at a certain point..."
"Sorry," One mutters to Elisa. Eventually, they reach a table of blackest PICNIC OUTAGE - a 21-year old sun-faded Anaheim CampOut table, but it serves. He lays down. Wordlessly, he gives a thumbs-up at the comment of the pain.
Flash! "Urgk," One grunts, but doesn't yell. "I dunno if, uh... if I can sleep with..."
Three comes up and explains: "Sleep inducer kicks out if you get wobbled too much. Hey, you know," Three says to One, "I wonder if it'd work on a ship!"
"Obviously it works on a ship," One answers him.
"I mean like an ocean ship," Three says. "You remember when we had that Commander and Master movie on the other month?"
One's visible eye squints. "Oh yeah. The waves. Yeah, that... ooof."
Three tells Elisa, "If you're looking at the leg, uh, I think that's basically just standard anatomy. Can you tell if it actually hit an artery? I know some of the like, portal vessel things got moved around a little but it's BASICALLY ordinary from about, mid thigh up." And Elisa can quickly confirm that; underneath an outer casing, One's legs go down to about mid thigh before being embedded in a stout mount for the lower reaches, apparently all cybernetic.
"One's like," Three says, before considering matters, and gesturing at himself. "Like you can see the skull reinforcement and a lot of the tendons got electrosheathing but basically," he mimes out 'the torso, including the hip joints' on his own body. "Lotta meat, SO, he can regenerate blood, which is kinda tricky, I can't do much of that myself."
"Thigh bone," One sings, a component of the ancient song. He turns his head to look at Three. "I kind of wondered about that with you, Three, like what if you get a cut?"
"Armor," Three says.
"Well yeah, I mean," One begins, before coughing. "Uuuugh. Oh," back to Elisa. "No torso pen. Uh... I don't remember where the plate release catches are. Three, can you?"
"Oh sure, if you need that," Three continues, with a little more action miming.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Of course Elisa understands what Yuliana is saying, and she smiles, to her wife, when she asserts that they're in the same story.
"Ah, you're a hacker!" Yuliana recognises what Six is saying, in a fashion. "Hijacking systems -- when they don't belong to you, too? You just change the header, the allegiance, the viewpoint! I'm told it's quite complex. Quite limited. But you've access. Access is permission."
She pauses, and adds: "I want a sleep inducer. It's hard to go to sleep. That's when the monsters come out." Oh, no.
She doesn't lambast One any more for screaming, since he thoughtfully apologised to her wife for the trouble.
And Yuliana, at least, doesn't mind the microbes around them being murdered. She is, in fact, used to it. "You're so clever!" She chirps, to her wife. "It won't be a tragedy, now!"
She adds, helpfully: "You have to bleed out all the blood, or it's haram." Beat, "But humans are, anyway." Is that why Yuliana doesn't eat people like her wife?
Probably. "Is it well?" She asks, looking over -- well, around -- Elisa's shoulder. "Will he keep lying to the graveyard of the world?"
<Pose Tracker> Elisa Kafim has posed.
Take over stuff. Interesting. Elisa listens to these Units discuss their capabilities without interruption. Of course Six would not do that to One.
"Sleep is important for the living and mortal," Elisa agrees. Then, One mutters, ,and Elisa says, "It is well."
The sleep inducer... Hmmm. A ship like that. "We shall find you a place to rest that is stable," Elisa assures One. "So that your sleep induction can be used."
Elisa looks to Yuliana. "Access is quite important."
She does not comment on the monsters. This time.
"I can tell," Elisa says. "I am certified to operate on humans."
That might be reassuring.
Three explains, and Elisa nods. "Yes, I see. It is good to retain one's 'meat'. It is harder to persist without it." Thigh bone... "I will require the release catches."
"Do you wish for me to dull your pain?" Elisa asks as she produces her medical kit. The sutures are ordinary fabric, not particularly Void-y. They will not run into problems.
"It will not be tragedy, no," she agrees. "And I am not hungry, at the moment."
"It will be well," Elisa confirms for Yuliana. "This is nothing that I cannot repair."
A pause. "Do you wish me to dull the pain?" she offers as she picks up her needle. When he responds in the affirmative she says, "This will not hurt."
And it doesn't! Isn't that nice. She starts suturuing up the wound, first, and will get to the rest in time. All, save for the minor dose of mind control, the ordinary way.
<Pose Tracker> Sympatria Unit has posed.
"I think so," Six agrees with Yuliana. "Like it works on computers sometimes if they don't have 2FA. I'm working on that."
Six is not working on that. She is lying.
They keep walking. "Oh, they're pretty great, yeah. Though, you do have to get an electrode in your brain for it to work, so that can be a deal breaker... you don't still need magnetic brain scans, right?" (Of course, there may be more to this story. Maybe Yuliana already HAS brain electrodes!)
"Don't let all his blood out!" Six protests. Three looks over, baffled, but his eyes saccade for a moment, as if to inload some data on what Yuliana said.
Three speaks, thus: "Yeah uh... it's kind of funny about blood volume actually. I remember early on, One had to get his blood pressure tuned, right? Like there's the peptide lining so he wasn't gonna have a blow out without, like, EXTREME gravity, but --"
Three removes some armor plating from One. One seems more or less like an ordinary human other than some plugs and attachment points. The inlays are very good; there is none of the lingering minor infection a lot of prosthetics get in the early stages. "Yeah?" One says, hazily. "I mean... I guess it depends."
One looks to Three. Three gives One a thumbs up. One raises his remaining arm to give Elisa, too, a thumbs-up. And then --
fwom
"... huh," One says.
There is a period of observational silence. (Three and Six have similar expressions. They watch the surgery without twitching or flinching, but with concern.) Six breaks the silence: "Did you use magic?"
"Yeah, I was kind of wondering about that," Three says, "now that she brought it up, I mean. Like..."
"Magic is a pretty complicated idea," Six begins to speak, "so I mean this in a really colloquial, like, generic sense, since I know you have a few different definitions - it comes from an ancient term meaning skill or the like, which was more perjorative back when everyone pooped in their own water and grew food in the ground, like animals!"
"No offense," Three tells Yuliana, "I know agriculture's important to Earth's economy." As he says this, it is partially occluded by Six continuing:
"It's also meant to use any action in accordance with your will which kind of seems like it cheapens the idea but maybe it just brings wonder to it? Since I mean like the whole underlying idea of cybernetics is about knowledge and control rather than being able to just, like, do this," and here Six reaches up and with an audible pop, *SPINS HER HEAD AROUND THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY DEGREES* -- actually more like three hundred and ninety, but she corrects, before the opposite of that audible pop latches her neck joint firmly into place. (What looked like a decorative choker wasn't actually decorative. It was a pivot point.)
"Anyway, I dunno," Six continues.
"Oh, uh, he's got monobactam allergy if you're gonna follow up with that," Three offers.
"We all do," Six says.
Three looks at her.
"WHAT," Six says. "What if they'd shot out OUR cockpit! Then One'd be the one carrying us around, probably talking all bold and heroic and stuff. Maybe he'd just carry around our heads!"
"You're a head," Three concludes, grumpily.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"Why not just spoof the phone the auth's going to?" Yuliana asks. "Well, unless they use a method that's actually secure, I guess. But if it's that kind of two-factor, I'd just ring the human behind it. They're easier to crack." She actually sounds remarkably lucid when she lapses into discussing saboteuring (her favourite thing), which is either a good or a bad sign.
"I was getting them," Yuliana explains, to Six. "The, um -- Photonic Neuromodulation Therapy -- I guess that's Photon Power, not magnets, but my brain breaks a lot. A lot," she repeats, again. "So I guess not. I guess not. I guess I had best," Yuliana moves right back into saying, when Elisa specifies that sleep is important for living and mortal beings. Technically, that still describes her!
For now.
"It is," she goes on to agree with her wife, on the matter of access. "But always will you have it. Nothing could keep you out, zhenushka," she tells her wife, regarding her warmly.
Her wife is certified to operate on humans. And... other creatures. Yuliana's somewhere in the middle of that.
Yuliana turns to Three, and blinks. "Does your blood scream often?" She asks, sceptical, because she either doesn't know or has completely forgotten what blood volume is.
Her wife isn't hungry! What a relief. "I am," Yuliana admits, "but it's all right. It reminds me of the emptiness of this world."
And she smiles, to her wife, and -- doesn't drape over her, because she's busy, which God willing One is properly appreciative for. "None are more skilled than you," she agrees, warmly, and turns to watch --
Yuliana blinks, as Elisa imparts that message to him. "So it can be of aid, as well," she remarks, and sounds a little surprised. Of course she would; she doesn't remember when Elisa used it to help her fall unconscious and avoid unpleasant medical procedures.
Yuliana does, in fact, scowl at Three when he says growing food in the ground is savage. She's distracted from saying something devastatingly racist, though, by --
"Huh. Neat!"
-- Six spinning her head right 'round, like a record, baby.
Conveniently, she's so distracted by that, she leaves the task of describing how Void magic works to the actual witch. At least she's grinning instead of scowling, now.
<Pose Tracker> Elisa Kafim has posed.
For now.
"I am pleased," Elisa says of her access to Yuliana. And she looks to the others as they speak. "I will not release his blood," she reassures Six. She considers. "Hmmm.. No signs of infection. That is well."
The observational silence allows Elisa to work. Then, she is asked if she used magic.
"Yes," Elisa answers eventually. After all the questions and such. "In my case it is skill. I am able to draw forth the power and energy of the Void to apply to the material realm." Pause.
"Ha ha ha!" Elisa laughs at Six spinning her head around, cheerfully and merrily. "That is great," she says. "Do it again."
She pauses, as she finishes suturing up the initial wound; it was a quick process, and the stitches are perfect and precise. "I will use an alternate cleanser," Elisa says of monobactam. "Does he have allergy to trifinerate?"
"...In short, the Void's energy can do many things, but one of the things it can do is assert my Will over another's mind. In this way, I can block mental signals such as pain, or force actions."
Pause. "But that is why I asked first. I find that many humans are quite... finicky, about their free will."
Pause. "...But it would seem that all of you are..."
She stops, pleased. "'Ahead' of the game."
<Pose Tracker> Sympatria Unit has posed.
Six's eyes saccade for a moment as Yuliana speaks about formats for social engineering. "Exaaaaactly," she tells her. "Exactly!"
"Photon Power is pretty amazing, but I didn't know it could help your brain," Six says, reaching up to rub the bridge of her nose. "I'm glad it's helping. That's the stuff with, wink wink, the mysterious masked lady and the mysterious masked guy in the robot with the dome head, right?"
At the prompting, Six reaches up and unlatches her neck. She spins her head around a number of times, then. If Yuliana looks carefully, she can get the impression that there is a seam underneath that choker, and the pieces between seem to be... magnetically linked? She turned off some kind of bolt thing. If she got pushed over... would her head fall off?
"Haha, I feel nauseuous," Six says after about four full revolutions. "So I'm stopping FOR NOW." Click. Back in place.
Three rubs the bridge of his nose, the same way Six just did. "Don't think so," he says. "Unless it's got another name. It's just the one big allergy. It's not like a primary antibiotic or something, but, heh, well, it's serious, so."
Now they know a vulnerability.
One seems to be vibing, one way or another.
"Huh," Three says, presently, about the power to control actions.
"So you're like a hacker too," Six suggests.
Three seems to be considering this.
One speaks. "I don't think that there's such a thing as, uh, the philosophical... should I be quiet, ma'am?" His visible eye turns up to Elisa.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Was Yuliana talking about Elisa having access to her? Well, she must have been. Why wouldn't her wife have access to her? The important thing is that Elisa is pleased, and Yuliana chirps, "Good!"
And she adds, to Six: "They made it up for me, since my brain was broken. But I don't get it any more. I had to stop. The government realised I was visiting, and it would be inconvenient. It's better if I don't go out for help. My wife keeps me well." She puts her finger to her lips, and says: "That's a spoiler! All revealed in a later chapter." Which is to say: wink wink, nudge nudge, basically that.
She beams to her delighted wife, and assures her, when Six declines to continue spinning: "It's fine, it's fine! We can do it later." Other people might not survive the process, but that's a small price to pay to make her wife laugh.
"You don't have to be afraid," Yuliana assures then, on the heels of Elisa revealing her Will. "You're our allies. We'd not harm you. So I kept it clean?" She asks, turning to Elisa. "I can't kill with your precision. But I remembered the slaughter." She's... talking about infection control, right?
Probably.
Point is, the Sympatrias can totally trust the Kafims with their vulnerabilities!
She laughs, at her wife's joke. "Haa, zhenushka, you're in a good mood!" She smiles, distracted from her worries. "They are, they are!"
<Pose Tracker> Elisa Kafim has posed.
Photon Power... Elisa shakes her head. "It is potent," she says, "Photon Power."
But she doesn't want to talk about it. One is vibing, at least. But Six suggests she's like a hacker, and Elisa says, "Yes, in a way. I suppose you could say that. Technically 'magic' is an unscientific term for it... But it is good enough for most purposes. There is a science to it, however. If you ever wish to learn, ask."
Spoilers....
"That is fine," Elisa says of stopping for now. And Elisa agrees, "Yes, we shall not harm our allies in this time. I am pleased that you remembered, Yuliana."
Elisa is in a good mood. Well, as good as she can be, given Yuliana's... affliction. But it was a bright spot.
"Philosophically," she says, "I do believe in 'free will'. However, it is fine if you do not. You need not be quiet... but now that you are stable," she says, "I must return to my wife. I leave you in your compatriots' care."
"My Yuliana," Elisa says. "Let us go."