World Tree MUSH

    WARNING: Viral infection detected. Current systems damage at 5.76% and climbing.

    Alty sits on the railing of the Kaguyahime staring dourly at the projections of the tiny hologram screen hovering in front of her. It's a diagnostic scan, showing a silhouette of her body, with several points highlighted in red and displaying varied warnings. It's akin to staring at a timer with her own death sentence counting down on it.
    The little shinki heaves a tiny sigh as another screen pops up beside it and she scrolls through the contents before beginning another download. "Maybe this one will work better." Murmured to herself as another fraction of a percent ticks away while she's clearly hard at work, muttering away.
    "Analyze and disassemble I understand way too well. ... But record...?"

    Outside the ship, the shadow of the Central Command Node looms large as the Kaguyahime sits 'parked' outside, searching for a way into the weird megalithic structure. Having retired her jetbike back to the ship's hold, Iron Lotus is going to go check on the various participants that have made their way on this crazy adventure, including but not limited to Astra and of course Alty, both of whom she has promised to be friends with so far!

    She doesn't yet know what's happened to the Shinki girl although she witnessed the quite spectacular way she took down the nanoprobe guardian of the base, so she wants to congratulate Alty.

    "Oh, hello!" she says, waving her way over. "Alty, how are you doing?"

Emily comes out from belowdecks, in the form of an auburn-haired woman in a midnight-blue dress -- just like the copy they faced before -- except with glowing purple eyes, a pair of white horns, and an extra pair of arms. She's looking uncharacteristically serious, too.

"Hey, Alty, Lotus," she says, in her usual voice. "None of the nano-reclamation units are functioning. I'll try to see if Astra can't fix any of 'em up, but I'm pretty sure our best hope is to smash that hive-looking thing." She gestures to the Central Command Node with both of her left arms.

    Alty is so engrossed in her diagnostics that the sudden call of a voice makes her jolt slightly. She doesn't go over the edge, but it does shake her up as she regains her balance and swipes the varied screens milling about her off to one side so she can look up.
    "Oh um..." It's Lotus. And there's Emily emerging, as well, with bad news. The shinki is silent for a beat, one hand reaching up to rub at her scarred eye.
    "I've been better." She does admit pretty candidly.

Iron Lotus makes a sympathetic noise. At first brush all she can see is the scar on Alty's eye and, thinking that she's just taken a bit of superficial damage, rolls her shoulders. "Sorry, Alty, if I was a different kind of robot girl I'd be able to pop some tools out of my fingertips and buff that right out for you." A dagger slowly clicks out of her wrist, then back in. "Can only do weapons, though."

    "Man though, you were really impressive taking down that guardian like that, you really got your second wind," she says with a smile. "I was worried you were in trouble a couple times, but Vanileth really had your back, huh?"

Emily nods. "I think ... we're ... probably gonna be able to deal with it," she says reassuringly, peering down at Alty's holographic screens. "I mean, everything else we've handled has gone well enough." She hesitates. "... I'll admit there's a part of me expecting everything to go to hell, but, y'know, that's not the pattern I've observed, I guess."

She smiles at Iron Lotus. "All three of us are pretty much robots, aren't we? As far as the standard stuff in our respective worlds are concerned," she says. "And yeah. You really saved our bacon, Alty."

    Spending a moment still rubbing at her eye, the shinki gives a slow shake of her head. "This is old." She says, referring to the scar. Though she edges away from the dagger somewhat, she continues, "And it has meaning for me." So no buffing that out, it seems. But scarlet eyes avert there gaze and-- fun fact, shinki are expressive enough to go pale with terror.
    Because mentioning Vanileth makes Alty lose all the color in her face, just thinking about that 'Fastball Special' all over again.
    "I didn't really want to go flying into it. I just got really lucky in the end." She brushes off her destruction of the guardian before another holoscreen pops up. She taps at it and sighs.
    "I've downloaded every single freeware antivirus I can get my hands on and I still can't purge the nanites from my systems."

"Pretty much," Lotus says to Emily. She's discovered recently that it's far more interesting to refer to herself as a 'robot girl' to simply explain the particulars of her life, as peoples' eyes tend to glaze over after a while when you start to go too in-depth as to explaining what Exalted are, particularly her own specific breed of them, so 'robot girl' is sufficient.

    When Alty mentions the problem of the day though, Lotus covers her mouth with her hands, and is actually quite shocked to hear it. Immediately, in her head, she kicks herself- of /course/ we couldn't have gotten this far without something like this happening to at least one of us, but why of all of us did it have to be the stowaway who didn't even really want to be here?

    "Oh, Alty, that's terrible," she says, worriedly. "Have you tried using some of those reclamation units we were using as weapons to fix it?"

Emily side-eyes Iron Lotus. "I said none of 'em are working," she says, with perhaps a bit too much force.

She harrumphs. "Yeah, I dunno if your internet is the same as the halcyon remnant's, but I don't think freeware antivirus is gonna cut it." She taps her chin thoughtfully, peering at Alty's holo-screens with her lower pair of hands on her hips. "And at the rate that number's been going up, it looks like trying to find any parts besides the ones we already got sounds like it'd take too long, so ... once again, it seems that the most efficient route is gonna be to take out the hive." ... She still insists on referring to it as a 'hive' for some reason.

    Emily answers that well enough for Alty, as she shakes her head slowy.
    "Freeware is all I can afford. My old master never exactly connected me to his credit card." She says somewhat spitefully, and going back to rubbing her scarred eye as though it were a force of habit.
    "There's nothing left to be said. The only option is to... Go in there right?" She says, glancing over the railing to the structure below. "I really don't want to." She admits fully. "But there isn't much of a choice is there?" Muttered as she pulls her jelly canteen from Slipway storage and takes a slow drink of the contents.
    Before she enlarges several of the screens for better viewing. Most of it is diagnostics, but she points out a pattern. "They're slowly eating at me. I've managed to slow it down, but there's... Almost a pattern to it, a single program running on repeat. 'Analyze, disassemble, record'. Whatever that means."

    Lotus looks a little embarrassed. "I just meant... you know... maybe you tried using one and it kinda worked but then it broke... would have been better than nothing."

    She doesn't seem to have any issues with Emily calling it a 'hive', but she adds in hopefully, "I can see some..." she strains her eyes. She was /better/ at this once, dangit. "I can see some bits of some kinda building from the outside. Maybe there's still building on the inside. Something in there we can use to shut it down before it gets any worse."

    "You gotta make the hero play," Lotus says to Alty. "That's what we've been doing so far. Fighting off nanoprobes, staving off storms, going to search for this ship... we've done a lot of different things before we crossed paths with you for the sake of defending this little town of Bonne Bon. But I'd say you still managed to do something worth standing up alongside the rest of us today," with a smile. 

    The smile quickly fades as Alty reinforces the fact that she /is/ being eaten by these things. "That's more insight than we've ever gotten so far, at least."

"Hmm." Emily considers this a moment. "Well, we obviously saw one of the results of 'record'," she says. "Five'll get you ten once we get inside, we'll have to fight a bunch of oversized ... Altines. Altineses?" She shakes her head. "You know what I mean. But basically, yeah."

She shrugs, and nods to Iron Lotus. "What she said," she says. "I mean. I'm not a hero, I just showed up in Bon Bonne because it caught my interest, and I've stayed because ..." She looks around. "... well, okay, I'll come out and say it, I like you guys." She smiles faintly. "Somehow, I got emotionally invested in all this, which, lemme tell you, is the worst-case scenario."

She pauses, and then backtracks a bit. "But, like, uh, the point is ..." She looks down at Alty. "You're not gonna be alone in this. We've got your backs. Somehow. And it ... uh ... would ... leave a bad taste in my mouth if you died."

... Emily isn't remotely good at lying about her feelings. Or at being encouraging and reassuring, really.

    There's little to be said for it. Alty is being eaten alive every passing moment, even if she has managed to staunch the progress. It's like slapping a band-aid on a gunshot and hoping for the best, right now.
    "Altines." She says to Emily first. "And if they're anything like me at all, you're going to have a problem. I'm not a hero, I'm a monster."
    "I didn't appear to defend anything. I didn't even want to be here. I know how selfish and cowardly that sounds, but it's the truth. I didn't even do all that much except what I'm good at. Destroying things." She says, pinching the bridge of her nose. "No one has ever 'had my back' before, and I don't think I really deserve it."
    Whatever the little shinki had been through before boarding the Kaguyahime, it clearly did not do her self-esteem any good at all.

Iron Lotus grimaces. "You are not a monster. You're a little cutie patootie."

    Well, that's one way of putting it, Lotus.

    "You're just a girl who got in a little over her head, and times like these are when it's good to have friends by your side so that they can help you out. Don't worry, Alty. We're going to get you through this safe and sound, I guarantee it. Exalted don't lose." She pumps a fist.

Emily considers this, then in a swirl of silvery glitter, her upper left hand shrinks down to being closer to Shinki-sized, and she gently puts it on Alty's shoulder. "Well, like I said, I'm no hero, either." She shrugs. "Hell, now you've got something riding on victory now, your reason for sticking this out is frankly way better than mine. You need to be here, or at least have people win. I ... don't, as much, I guess." She actually sounds slightly uncomfortable admitting this.

She glances at Iron Lotus. "... So what happens when two Exalted fight each other, then?" she says dryly.

    "If we lose, we can always come back for another go. If we die, then the blessed amphora reincarnates us! Apparently."

    Orks ain't got nothin' on Exalted.

    Cu...tie... Patootie?
    All of Alty's apparent self-loathing flies out the window as she glances up, brow furrowed. A new holo-screen appears above her head with a single character on it.

    ?

    It's an utterly baffled look that crosses the shinki's expression, distracting her right up until she realizes Emily's hand is now more suitable for setting on her shoulder. The little Altines tenses noticeably on physical contact, and she shifts uncomfortably for a beat, but she doesn't leap away from the touch. The question about Exalts duking it out sails clean over her head as she props her hands on her knees.
    "Mn. Well. I should be alright for a few more days at the very least. I'm fighting it off as best I can, and it'll be at least a little while before the infection reaches my AI partition. So. I guess here I am. I'll sharpen my swords for when we go in there."

"Well." Emily shrugs. Yeah she's not about to try to debate the finer points of reincarnation. "Shinki and eudaemons don't have that luxury, soooo I think I'm gonna be working on saving her life, if that's all the same to you." Yeah, she's turned her amused flippancy back on again.

Despite her observation skills, she apparently manages not to notice Alty's discomfort with physical contact, and she just fails to stifle a giggle at the question mark. "Atta girl," she says, lowering her hand and restoring it to its full size. "We're gonna get you out of this, all right?"

    "Don't worry," Lotus says, patting Alty on the head. "We're probably gonna head in there way before that, just give everyone time to get psyched up and just shake out the vents to make sure nobody else is hiding in them-" What a convenient way of excusing anyone who ends up in the next scene that wasn't in this one, Lotus! "And we'll head inside. We're not just gonna leave you standing around suffering for days, after all."

    "Then you can tell us all about what you want to do with your future now you've got the whole wide world ahead of you." Freedom is scary, but also amazing.

    Again, physical contact- the headpat in this case- makes the shinki cringe faintly. But it is true, shinki don't have that benefit. It's not a philosophical conversation she can really take any stake in. She puffs her cheeks out.
    "Why?" It's a curious question. "You don't even know me..." She points out to Emily, but she doesn't fight the topic too hard beyond that as she goes back to rubbing her eye. "What I want to do with my future..." Murmured for a beat. "I want to find my sister."

Emily can certainly sympathize with freedom being scary and amazing. "Heh, I don't even know what I wanna do with my future!" she says. Although she doesn't sound completely flippant; it's like the idea has struck her enough that she's actually thinking about it.

She looks back down at Alty. "Cuz, like I said," she says with a smile. "I got emotionally invested in this adventure, and now you're an inextricable part of it."

    "Because we're friends now, and we're all in this together," Lotus replies to Alty, rubbing the back of her head. "Making friends is the most important part of my life to me, and being friends means you help one another out and help secure happiness for one another. That's what I've learned by being in this multiverse."

Emily smiles faintly at Iron Lotus, but generally does her best not to look like that comment has affected her at all.

    Alty really doesn't seem to like getting rubbed like that, because now she's actively squirming. But she still doesn't say anything on the topic aside from a very small "Um."
    But apparently she's a part of something now. And that seems to be all that's necessary for someone to stick their neck on the line for her.
    Friends, huh... The little shinki still doesn't quite get it. Yet. Not fully, at least as she dips her chin to her chest.
    "... Thanks."