Cid Harley, Emily Nyx, and Erebus-model AA23 are sitting around in Cid's trailer home in the as-yet-unnamed settlement; Emily is once again in the form of a four-armed six-eyed lavender-skinned demoness with a T-shirt that says "BOY" but with the 'female'-symbol in place of the O.

    Erebus-models are pretty good at examining technology, and so it's Double-A's turn to look over the device Emily brought to the settlement from her latest adventure. Her left eye is glowing green, and projects holographic reticles around the signet ring in her hand.

    After a few moments, she deactivates the hologram and shakes her head. "The technology's too different from what we had here to be able to reverse-engineer it," she says, "which is only one of the reasons why actually repairing the damage has too many question marks to say if it even can be repaired."

    "Well, shit," says Emily, though she's still smiling.

    Cid chortles. "What was that thing, anyway?"

    "Nothing much, just looted it off a dude's corpse," says Emily. "It allowed the wearer to stop time."

    Double-A whistles. "Pretty fantastic," she says. "Too fucking bad, though, I guess." She tosses it at Emily with a little too much force, and Emily fumbles to catch it. "Was he Castor Pollux-levels of bad?"

    "I'm not the one who killed him," says Emily. She closes her hand around the ring, and once again slips it under her surface of her nanomachines.

    "Oh," says Double-A.

    "You live a strange life, Emily Nyx," Cid says flatly.

    Emily gives him a quadruple thumbs-up. "That's eudaemons, son!"

    "No, it's just you," Double-A says without missing a beat, then turns to leave. "Uh. See you guys around, I guess," she says awkwardly; for many Eudaemons, voluntarily leaving another Eudaemon's territory without causing trouble is usually a polite enough goodbye, so she isn't used to actually saying it.

    Emily follows her outside into the snow-covered settlement. "How'd you get Wraithed, by the way?"

    Double-A glares at her and balls up her fists -- more defiant than she had in response to Uni, whom she mentally categorized as "not a Greater Eudaemon", and thus an equal as far as intimidation was concerned. "Why do you care?"

    "Because if the Wraiths are back, we need to be ready for them, Double-A," says Emily sharply. "... Oh gods, am I the responsible one in this conversation? Is that a thing that's happening again? Jesus fucking heck."

    Double-A tries to settle down. "Don't know where they came from," she says. "Just ... a lot of them popped up in my territory, and I zigged when I should've zagged."

    "Damn," says Emily. "Well, better to know that much, and all that." She gives a little wave.

    Double-A nods curtly, and turns towards the direction she'd originally come here from as a Glitch.

    But then she stops. "Y'know," she says, without turning back to face Emily, "I wasn't exactly built to be a specialist in Greater Eudaemons ... but ... right after Zeus-model 6NOK started calling themself 'Gnosis', they taught me how to scan for the connection between the physical form and the 'self', and ..." She shrugs. "... I get the feeling your connection is awfully strong."

    Emily nods. "That is one of the defining characteristics of a Greater Eudaemon, yeah."

    "Your synchronization level is higher than even Gnosis had," says Double-A. "You hear me, Nyx-model MLE0? You're literally more connected with your physical form than the first Greater Eudaemon."

    Emily furrows her brow. "And?" she says. "Gnosis wasn't the most powerful or skilled Greater, they just got there first." (In fact, Emily had originally decided to become a Greater Eudaemon specifically to outperform Gnosis, after a confrontation in which Gnosis deflected all of MLE0's attacks and then wandered off because she didn't pose a threat, but a relative stranger like Erebus-model AA23 doesn't need to know that.)

    Double-A still doesn't turn around. "Do you know what happens when a Greater Eudaemon's physical form gets too connected to their 'self'?" she asks sweetly.

    Emily frowns. "No, I don't."

    "Me neither," says Double-A. "And seeing how you did me a solid twice in a row, I'd rather keep it that way." And she takes off and flies away.

    Emily watches her go -- letting another Eudaemon leave your territory without firing potshots at them is another polite enough goodbye -- and frowns. "... We need to figure out how to get ourselves some goddamn maintenance," she mutters to herself.