World Tree MUSH

    It's been a few days since the raid on the back alley shinki fight ring at the docks, and there hasn't been sign of The Angel of Death; not hide nor hair of her since. Ducking offworld for a few days helped with that, but sometimes one must always return to the scene of their crimes.
    It's a rainy day, and it's miserable and overcast and completely dreary. In fact, it's that rain that seems to have caught a few shinkis out in the open. Most are just the average shinki with a good master, sent out on an errand and got stuck looking for cover until the rain let up.
    Others are a sadder kind. Masterless roving shinkis that never submitted themselves for refurbishing or re-adoption after the loss of their initial masters. Some like a certain scarred Altines huddled under a bench in the park.

    Uni's been hanging around this particular blossom, in part because she enjoys the ambiance, it reminds her of home to a degree... and partly because she caught the trickle of Share Energy coming from her newly formed little 'cult' and wanted to be close in case some of them needed her.

    Now, random Masterless Shinki aren't likely part of her cult, but they're still alone, in trouble and probably getting water into uncomfortable places on their little robot bodies... so on spotting the group, the young goddess walks over, and sets her umbrella up above the bench to ward off the rain.

    "I wondered when you would turn up again." she offers softly to the Altines, not accusatory in the least.

Serrah has doubled back over to this world, wearing a black raincoat with a cat-eared hood, cut at the bottom to resemble bat-wings. It's not as effective as it could be, and she looks fairly irritable and damp as she walks along. She does perk up slightly when she sees Uni -- the hood's ears actually expressively seem to perk up a bit -- and heads over. "Oh, hey," she says. She looks awkwardly down at Alty, looking as though she isn't entirely sure what to say.

    Needless to say, the small act of kindness of gifting a few wet shinki an umbrella will likely not go unheard of, and soon the word of the Cult of Lastation will spread even sooner once they catch wind of their goddess candidate's generosity.
    But The Angel of Death isn't among those shinki. In fact it's like the lot of them are leery of the scarred Altines, not daring approach or go near, or offer to let her huddle in with them in their now safe spot. Which is fine and fair as she's about to be busy with both Uni and Serrah- who she only seems to notice them when their shadows overtake her.
    Glancing up from where she sits with her knees hugged to her chest, the dark-themed shinki jolts.
    "Wah! A-a-ah! Ah!" She stammers. "I didn't- I mean- it was- I um- um...!" Ah, she looks on the verge of panic already.

Demi had heard about the Shinki fights, which certainly got her attention. She been previously had been doing maintence on Nurvus but she was now free to travel to other worlds again. She would certainly do anything possible that she could to aid the small robots even though she wasn't that familar with this worlds technology. She doesn't seem to be too bothered by the rain, she's waterproofed so rain isn't an issue unless if it's acid rain. She smiles upon seeing Uni again and offers her cape to help keep the shinki dry as well.

    Uni holds up a hand, palm open and pointed towards the Altines. "Calm down, I'm not going to report you. I just want to talk." she says, looking up towards Serrah and Demi, offering a slightly curt 'thanks' to the latter. She doesn't know them, so they get the standard issue tsundere greeting.

    Uni kneels down on the wet ground, and offers a hand out toward the Altrines. "I wanted to ask if you wanted to fight in that arena."

Serrah promptly looks just as panicked as Alty! "Uh! I ... uh ..." She looks helplessly to Uni. Okay, good, she's handling things. She nods to the new arrival of Demi, and stands so that she's basically exactly half under the umbrella.

Though she does pause at Uni's line of questioning. "... right to the point, huh," she murmurs, in a very similarly-curt tone.

    A third figure approaching means the shinki looks on the verge of cutting and bolting like a rabbit. But it's the 'I'm not going to report you' that keeps her from actually doing so. There's a moment of pause. Lips purse and her eyes even narrow suspiciously, before she gives in and just brings a hand up to rub her scarred eye. "M-mn..."
    She spends a second squirming in place, wrestling with her desire to flee, but manages to keep it in check to answer the question, even if she shies away from the offered hand.
    "... No."

Demi hadn't had a chance to meet Uni but she did remember the huge rifle she had, it was pretty hard to forget after all. Hearing Uni's comment her attention turns towards Alty was this the robot that had been mentioned on the news? She wonders if she should turn her in but then hears her response. "Who forced you to fight in the arena?" If someone was reprogramming robots and forcing them to fight them against their will then they needed to be brought in.

    "So he forced you to do it, just because he could?" asks Uni next, pulling her hand back and resting it in her lap. "That's horrible.. I'm wishing I'd done more than just punch him now." she adds, glancing back to Demi. "Her Master was making her fight, and getting rich off of it."

Serrah nods to Uni's explanation. "And I wish I'd chucked more than one baseball at 'im," she says sourly. "Or aimed for his head and thrown harder." She doesn't sound entirely comfortable with this, however.

She regards Alty for another moment, and then sighs softly and sits down on the damp ground. "... I'm in ... kind of the same situation, I think," she admits. "My name's Serrah Delany. This douchebag vampire Duke of the Blossom where I'm from ... he turned me into a vampire. I'm on the run from him, and ..." She pulls back her hood, and brushes aside the hair on her forehead, revealing a black heart-shaped mark. "... let's just say that if he catches up with me, he can give me orders I can't say no to." She shrugs. "And I bet you a billion bucks I'll be made to do 'so many bad things'," she adds, echoing Alty's words back in the arena.

    Chin rests on knees, and the Altines falls silent as Uni answers Demi for her. ... And then she hears Serrah's issue.
    "That's terrible..." She voices her opinion there, before doll-jointed shoulders lift and fall in a deep sigh.
    But she clears her throat softly at such readiness to injure her former master.
    "... He said if I kept fighting, I'd see my sister again." Muttered so quietly it's almost inaudible.
    "I didn't like fighting. It was scary, and I hated hurting all those other shinki."

"Your master built you to fight other robots for money?" Demi frowns a bit as she hears that. She knows Wren would never do such a thing but it sounds like others weren't so fortunate. "I've had to disable robots myself but they were a threat to the well-being of Motavia." She can't really put her on a pedestal compared to Alty.

 "Was he brought in by the authorities or do he managed to escape?" Uni and Serrah's comment made it a bit unclear to hear. "Vampire? Searching for cross-reference...you don't appear to be a humanoid bat." She scans Serrah to make sure. "Oh it's a pleasure to meet all of you, I'm Diminutive Freyna-Class Android. Most just call me Demi for short."

    Uni tenses up at the mention of a sister, and being unable to see them. "/.../" there's an intensity in the silence that follows, but it passes, though she still looks upset by that revelation. "He was arrested, but knowing slime like him, he'll slip through the legal cracks. Just gives me another chance to make him suffer like he's made his Shinki suffer." she clenches a fist, but relaxes it. "As far as I'm aware, Shinki are produced for and distributed by a company called Multiple Moveable Systems. MMS for short. They're meant to be helpers, but some people force them to fight in unofficial death matches like we broke up the other day... they're supposed to use a Virtualizer to mitigate the damage inflicted... but these unsanctioned bouts don't use it, and many Shinki get broken apart... it's just a lucky thing their 'self' is nigh indestructable."

Serrah's vital signs, according to Demi's scan: dead. Her digestive system works down as far as her stomach, and her muscles seem to be more-or-less behaving themselves, but her heart and lungs are reading as dead, within the past minute or so. They will also read 'dead within the past minute or so' if Demi scans her again the next minute, or even an hour later.

"Shit," she mutters. She doesn't have any siblings of her own, but ... "Now that sounds like some kind of manipulation, if ever I heard it." She looks up at Demi. "No, I mean ... the supernatural being." She shrugs. "Possibly 'mythological' in some worlds?" She sounds like she can't quite believe she's saying this. "But yeah, what she said," she adds, jerking a thumb to Uni.

She stops, and looks away. "... shit, I need to be careful about ... being ..." She shakes her head. "... violent, or not caring about humans."

    "He didn't build me." The shinki replies. Uni has the gist of it though, and her lips purse into a thin line again. "He was arrested." She says rather simply to Demi, which confirms Uni's statement well enough. An introduction though...
    "Ah... Master always just called me 'Altines'. Or something worse... Leene called me 'Alty', though."
    Then her brow knots. "The only vampires I know are from scary movies."

    "Oh... Right, introductions. I'm Uni. I'm the CPU Candidate of Lastation, though that doesn't mean too much, since I think my world is just a Bud... I'm looking for it, but it's almost like it's hiding from me." she says, glancing to the group of shinki huddling under her umbrella.

"Oh excuse me, it sounds like your relationship is quite different than mine with Master Wren. And that you are one of many models produced on a mass scale. Do you have any idea where your sister might be?" Alty's situation is quite a bit different that of Demi's.

 Meanwhile her attention turns back towards Serrah, "This can't be right miss, it says that you are recently deceased. I've found records of the dead been reanimated before but I've been unable to verify them. CPU Candidate so you are eligible for some type of authoritarian AI?" That reminds her of Mother Brain.

Serrah shrugs. "Well, I guess I'm the 'scary movie' kind of vampire, then," she tells Alty gently. "I'm ... trying not to be scary, though."

She nods to Uni. "Nice work on finding worshipers here of all places," she says, a little bit of that curtness there as well. Is she being sarcastic? ... Is it even clear to her whether she's being sarcastic? Who knows.

She actually manages a fangy grin at Demi. "Yeah, I guess my biology runs on magic," she says, as if she was talking about photosynthesis. "Nobody's sure what the exact inner workings are, but it's not a miracle, I can tell you that much."

    "Mass produced." Alty mumbles in response to Demi, rubbing at her scarred eye again as if by habit. She too casts a glance over to the umbrella-hiding shinki.
    The response is a withering series of glares and glowers.
    "Weh?!" But hearing that Serrah is the scary movie kind of vampire gets Alty up on her feet looking ready to rabbit it out from under the bench and risk the rain.
    For someone called The Angel of Death she's kind of a big coward isn't she?

Serrah just ... deflates at Alty's reaction. "See, this," she says, her voice devoid of life. "This is the worst part of being turned into a vampire against your will." She pulls her hood back up, with slightly too much force, and gets up and starts to walk away without another word.