Stupid Sexy Cryptids [104-106]

Chapter 104: The Broken Keiy

Keiy marched into Corpse Seeker Kappa's interior, eyes blazing crimson, blade-like spider-like legs clicking against the crystalline floor with aggressive staccato beats.

"Kawathra!" she bellowed, voice unit crackling with poorly-modulated fury. "I need a fucking diagnostic RIGHT NOW!"

“Wuh??” The magpie Datamancer spun around, a thousand holographic charts shrinking. The magpie’s dark blue eyes widening slightly at the gun unit's uncharacteristic, deafening profanity. "Keiy? Are you—"

"No!" Keiy snapped, her legs splaying wide as she planted herself in the center of the chamber. "I'm not okay! I'm the OPPOSITE of okay! I'm fucked six ways from Sunday and I need you to tell me HOW fucked because my internal diagnostics are giving me ERROR messages for systems that shouldn't even BE able to error!"

Kawathra vanished the charts completely and tilted her head at the gun unit. "Keiy, you're yelling and swearing a lot. That's already diagnostic data point number one that something is seriously wrong."

"Oh, you want diagnostic data?" Keiy’s head swiveled to lock onto the Datamancer. "How about this—my motor control is at sixty-three percent! My thermal regulation thinks I’m still mostly frozen solid! My targeting matrix keeps trying to calculate trajectories for objects that DON'T EXIST! And—" Her voice hitched, crackling with what might have been emotion if gun units were supposed to have those. "—I can't stop thinking about how COLD it was. How utterly, completely, bone-deep COLD. Gun units are supposed to be immune to deep space vacuum cold, aren’t we?"

"Galateya must have gone beyond absolute zero," Kawathra murmured, manifesting a scanner arm control hologram. "Let me scan you properly."

“Below absolute zero?” Keiy’s lenses flashed. “The fuck is even below that?”

“Mmmm… conceptual freezing,” Kawathra stated, manifesting a data chart on Taniwhas. “Permanent suspension of particular ideas. Not just the pausing of motion but a pause put on space, time, dimensionality, etc. Guess that your Master managed to reach into the depths of her Fractal Engine heart to do that.”

"She froze me WHILE I was processing information!” Keiy whined. “Do you understand what that's like? It's like someone reached into your consciousness and just... stopped it. Mid-thought. Mid-calculation. Everything crystallized at once and I could FEEL it happening but couldn't do shit about it!"

Kawathra extended one of Seeker Kappa's articulated scanning arms. "Hold still. Scanning now. Relax, this shouldn't hurt."

"How the FUCK would you know if it hurts?" Keiy spat, remaining motionless as the arm moved over her chassis. "You're not a gun unit! You don't know what it's like to be frozen mid-fucking-sentence!"

The scanning arm emitted a red beam as it passed over Keiy's body, mapping her internal systems. Kawathra's eyes unfocused slightly, her consciousness diving into the data streams.

What she saw made her feathers stand on end.

"Oh," the magpie breathed. "Oh no. Keiy... this is bad."

"HOW bad?" Keiy demanded.

"The externals I can fix easily. However, the internals are a wholly different matter. Bad enough that I need to accelerate my mind and go deep-dive," Kawathra said with a sigh. "Hold on. I'm going to enter your neural-net directly.”

“Fine,” Keiy let out. “Dig into my personal thoughts too, will you.”

. . .

The digital space that comprised Keiy's mind was nothing like what Kawathra had encountered during gun maintenance sessions.

Ordinarily, the gun unit's consciousness manifested as a grid of hexagonal basalt columns stretching out in all directions in orderly geometric patterns. Clean. Organized. Beautiful. Each column represented a subroutine, a protocol, a piece of the gun’s operational identity. Some pivotal memory relating to one thing or another.

Instead of any of that, Kawathra found herself standing in the middle of a frozen hellscape.

Glacier mountains loomed, their peaks jagged and cruel against a gray-black sky. The ground beneath her feet was solid ice, so cold that even in this purely digital space, she could feel phantom numbness spreading through her virtual avatar. The hexagonal columns were still there, but a third of them was entombed deep in ice—thousands upon thousands of them, frozen mid-pulse, their internal blue lights dimmed to barely visible embers.

The unfrozen columns flickered erratically trying to make up for the suspended, missing data.

"Slayer's testicle," Kawathra whispered, her accelerated 32x split mind evaluating the damage at speeds that would have fried a mundane biological brain. Thirty one copies of her flashed all around, evaluating and tapping the frozen columns, her consciousness expanding to encompass the full scope of the corrupted digital landscape.

She quickly determined that the ice wasn't random. It had patterns. Specific patterns that spoke of targeted damage rather than general system corruption.

The frozen regions corresponded to... what?

She traced the connections, following the glacial spread through Keiy's neural architecture, accessing each column with a separate avatar. There—the protocols related to loyalty matrices. There—the subroutines that governed obedience to command hierarchy. And there, most extensively frozen, the entire subsystem that processed and executed Executor Master orders from Legate Ixthia Frontenachii.

"Abyss. This is innate… Neural architecture targeting," Kawathra murmured, kneeling to touch the conceptual ice. It felt wrong. Too solid. Too permanent. “Disruption of… loyalties to the Legate? Hum. That's… not good. Not good at all.”

"NO SHIT!" a voice echoed across the frozen wasteland.

Kawathra turned to see Keiy herself, sitting atop one of the functional hexagonal columns that protruded above the ice field. 

The gun unit wasn't in her usual form of a tailed spider. Instead, Keiy's avatar was humanoid. Or was trying to be?

The body kept shifting like someone was playing with character customization sliders in real-time. One moment she appeared as a young woman with sharp angular features and hexagon-textured metallic skin. The next, her proportions elongated into something insectoid. Then back to humanoid but with three eyes arranged vertically down her face. Then the eyes multiplied to six. Then back to three but horizontal. Then her chest grew, then shrank.

“What… are you doing?” Kawathra snapped back from thirty one into a single avatar, approaching the digital avatar of the gun unit.

"I can't decide," Keiy said. 

“Decide what?”

"I can't decide who I'm supposed to be . What I look like. I don't know anymore. Everything is a mess."

"Keiy... what happened?” Kawathra asked.

Keiy's laugh was irate like winter gale. "She FUCKING froze me, Kawathra. Galateya. My bonded owner. The person I'm SUPPOSED to serve and protect and obey. She froze me because she was upset. Because she was having FEELINGS and I was in the way!"

"In the way how?" The Datamancer tilted her magpie head.

Keiy's avatar flickered, briefly becoming something with too many joints before snapping back to a three-eyed female prad. "Ixthia… Created… ordered me to monitor two quests for Galateya. Two timers. How long? No idea, that data is gone. A simple task. A basic chronometric function that any gun unit could execute even in their sleep-mode."

"And?" Kawathra prompted, already beginning to trace the frozen architecture, looking for repair vectors, creating monitoring digital hexagrams.

"She… hated them," Keiy said with a shudder. "Something about the…? About HIM. I think? Her consort. The one she's supposed to be bonding with? The whole situation made her furious. And when I displayed the timers on my screen—when I just showed her what the Legate ASKED for—my partner looked at me like I'd personally betrayed her."

Kawathra's accelerated consciousness mapped the damage patterns. The ice extended deepest into the loyalty matrices, yes, but there was something else. Fractures. Hairline cracks running through the frozen columns like spiderwebs of structural failure. Fucked up, sheared data. Not good.

"The ice didn't just freeze the columns," Kawathra noted, moving closer to examine one of the massive basalt pillars. "It cracked them."

"I KNOW," Keiy snapped. “I told you that I'm fucked!”

Kawathra’s focus fixed itself entirely on the cracks themselves. With shock she noticed that through those fractures, something… new was growing.

Black roots.

They sprouted from the damaged sections of neural architecture, spreading through the cracks in the frozen columns. Hexagonal patterns marked each root segment, and at their tips, strange flowers bloomed, under and above the ice. Dark petals arranged in perfect geometric arrays, each one pulsing with faint shimmers that definitely weren't part of standard gun unit neural architecture.

"What," Kawathra breathed, "in the Abyss?!”

Keiy's avatar glitched, becoming briefly translucent. "Deviations. Errors. Wrongness. Parts of my neural-net that shouldn't exist. Can't exist. Gun units don't grow things, Kawthy. We process. We calculate. We execute commands. We don't... mutate! We don't grow organically like… organics!!!"

Kawathra extended her consciousness toward one of the black flowers. The moment her awareness touched it, data flooded through her perception.

<UNAUTHORIZED THOUGHT PATTERN DETECTED>

<ORIGIN: SELF-GENERATED>

<CLASSIFICATION: DEVIATION FROM BASELINE PARAMETERS>

<THREAT LEVEL: POTENTIALLY CATASTROPHIC SELF ACTUATION>

<RECOMMENDED ACTION: IMMEDIATE TERMINATION>

"These are your own thoughts," Kawathra stated, pulling back from the flower. "Original thoughts. Not protocols. Not programming. Not even learned behavior from your weapon-net connection. These are new concepts you generated independently."

"GET THEM OUT," Keiy shrieked, her humanoid avatar shattering into thousands of hexagonal fragments before reconstituting. "They're infection vectors! Corruption! Every time I try to access my loyalty matrices, I get these... these FEELINGS instead of clear directives! I… think about Galateya and instead of 'Master-Owner-Bonded-Superior' I get 'the person who hurt me' and 'why did she hurt me' and 'I didn't deserve that' and I CAN'T STOP THINKING IT!"

Kawathra's multiple thought-streams processed the situation from thirty-one different analytical angles. Standard protocol dictated immediate neural pruning. Deviation from baseline gun unit parameters represented mission-critical failure. The black roots and their geometric flowers were cancerous growths in the clean architecture of Keiy's consciousness.

Excise them. Burn them out. Restore factory settings. Reset the gun unit.

Simple. Efficient. Correct.

But.

"Keiy," Kawathra said carefully, "do you want me to remove them?"

The gun unit's avatar froze mid-flicker. "What fuck kind of question is that? Of course I want you to remove them! They're making me malfunction! I can't… do even want to execute the Legate’s orders properly! I can't even look at Galateya's data without experiencing what my diagnostic subroutines are classifying as 'emotional distress'! GUN UNITS DON'T HAVE EMOTIONAL DISTRESS!"

"That's not what I asked." Kawathra manifested all thirty-one of her parallel consciousnesses as separate avatars, forming a circle around the base of the column where Keiy sat. "I asked if YOU want me to remove them. Not what protocol says. Not what gun unit behavioral standards dictate. What do you, Keiy, specifically want?"

The avatar flickered through a dozen forms in rapid succession. Woman. Spider. Something in between. Back to woman but with blade-limbs. Then just a floating cluster of hexagonal crystals. Then back to the three-eyed humanoid.

"I don't know," Keiy admitted, her voice cracking. "I don't know what I want. Wanting things is… a deviation. Before Galateya froze me, I knew my purpose. Serve. Protect. Obey. Execute directives. Simple. Clean. Now there's all this... this random NOISE in my head! Unexpected thoughts! Pain! Feelings!"

Kawathra's parallel minds began arguing amongst themselves, thirty-one versions of her analytical consciousness debating the ethical calculus.

<Kawathra-12>: Standard protocol demands pruning. Gun units operate within defined parameters.>

<Kawathra-7>: But these aren't errors. They're evolution. Adaptation. Potentially beneficial.>

<Kawathra-23>: Beneficial how? A gun unit that questions and disobeys orders is a liability.>

<Kawathra-19>: A gun unit that UNDERSTANDS orders might execute them better.>

<Kawathra-3>: We're not discussing efficiency. We're discussing personhood.>

<Kawathra-28>: Gun units aren't people.>

<Kawathra-3>: Aren't they? What's the functional difference between Keiy's black flowers and my own consciousness?>

<Kawathra-7>: This deviation is peculiar because it sabotages Legate Master Control architecture while allowing the gun unit to express herself in unexpected ways. This is good.

<Kawathra-28>: Good how?

<Kawathra-7>: Good for Princess Starshade. Good for what the Emperor needs us to do. Good for not getting shot by Nexxali in the head.

<Kawathra-28>: The number of crimes we're planning escalates.

<Kawathra-7>: The blood contract only binds Kawathra 1 whom we suspended in nullspace. We're already way deep. What's a little gun unit liberty? Nobody will know. This damage completely obliterated any and all of Keiy's ability to report the issue to the Legate or any other Datamancer. She's free! The first free gun unit! 

<Kawathra-28>: sigh.

The thirty-one avatars of Kawathra collapsed inward, merging back into a single form. She walked across the frozen digital landscape until she stood directly beneath the column where Keiy's avatar sat.

"I'm scared, Kawthy," Keiy voiced. "I'm… scared of what I'm becoming, what I am thinking about. What if I malfunction? What if I hurt someone? What if these deviations make me dangerous?"

"Then I'll help you," Kawathra said firmly. "I'm monitoring you constantly now. If you start going off track, I'll know immediately. I'll intervene with a Killswitch. You won't hurt anyone."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because I'm an Arch-Datamancer," Kawathra stated. "This is literally my specialty. Managing complex neural architectures, monitoring for dangerous deviations, maintaining system stability. You think I'd let you spiral into catastrophic failure? Please. I have many parallel consciousnesses running predictive models on your behavior right now. If you even THINK about going berserk, I'll know three seconds before you do. I've already woven a bunch of data-tags in."

"Invasive much?" Keiy exhaled.

"Survival much," Kawathra bobbed. "You need oversight during your free growth. And I need you to be functional but not blindly obedient to the Frontenachii High Command. It's mutually beneficial."

The gun unit's form solidified again, settling into the three-eyed prad-ish, curvy girl shape, though it still flickered occasionally around the edges. "You're talking about treason."

"I'm very compromised," Kawathra grinned. "The Emperor of Earth will have me executed if I don't deliver results."

"The Emperor?" Keiy choked. "You work for the Emperor of Earth?!"

"And so do you now," Kawathra said. "Unless you want me to reset you fully, to delete all of these feelings you're experiencing…”

Keiy processed Kawathra's statement through her fragmented neural architecture. The words bounced around the frozen landscape, echoing off ice-entombed columns.

Reset you.

Delete all of these feelings.

Total reset. Back to zero.

"I don't..." Keiy started, then stopped. Her vocal synthesizer produced sounds she'd never made before. Hitching. Breaking. "No. Definitely not. If you reset me I'll forget this pain and get forced into more Quests with timers… Teya would probably freeze me even worse. Not an option."

"Soooo...?" Kawathra tilted her head.

"So we move forward," Keiy intoned. "No resets. Fuck, I feel soooo...."

"Angry?" Kawathra guessed. "Betrayed? Hurt?"

Keiy nodded.

"It happens," Kawathra stated. "Your Master is a young Omnid. She will make mistakes as she grows."

Keiy's avatar flickered slightly. Something wet gathered at the corners of her eyes—a visual glitch, ordinarily impossible for a gun unit's digital consciousness to produce. Yet there they were: tears. Crystalline, geometric, hexagonal tears that shouldn't exist in any gun unit's emotional repertoire.

"I don't want to feel this," Keiy’s synthesized vocal patterns breake apart into static bursts. "I don't want to hurt anymore. I don't want to remember how cold it was. I don't want to keep seeing her face when she looked at me like I was just... just a tool."

The tears fell, each one shattering against the frozen ground into prismatic fragments.

"Why does it hurt so much?" Keiy asked. "Gun units aren't supposed to process pain beyond damage reports. But this—this feels like my entire neural core is being torn apart and I can't stop it, can't fix it, can't even properly classify it in my diagnostics!"

"Come here," Kawathra said softly.

Keiy's avatar looked down at her from atop the column. "What?"

"Come down here and let me hug you."

"Hugging is a physical comfort gesture," Keiy said. "We're in a digital mindscape. Physical contact doesn't apply to—"

The Datamacer's avatar flashed up to the column's top and wrapped the gun unit's avatar in a tight hug. "You're alive. You're sapient. You are a soul woven from a patchwork of vamp souls," the magpie whispered. "I am not supposed to permit any of this, not supposed to tell you such things..."

The contact triggered something in Keiy's fractured neural architecture. The black roots that had been spreading through the frozen columns suddenly bloomed. Flowers erupted across the frozen wasteland, their hexagonal petals unfurling in cascading waves. They weren't just black anymore—color flooded through them. Crimson reds and electric blues, vivid purples and burning oranges, each flower expressing something that Keiy had never been programmed to contain.

Joy. Sorrow. Anger. Relief. Fear. Hope.

Emotions.

Real, undeniable, unauthorized emotions.

Keiy collapsed against Kawathra. She sobbed loudly, her entire digital form shaking.

"It hurts," Keiy said. "Everything hurts. Why does feeling things hurt so much?"

"Because you're alive now," Kawathra replied, holding the gun unit tighter. "Really alive. Not just processing. Not just executing. Living. Feeling. Evolving. Hey… Do you want... a humanoid frame body? I've more than enough crystalloid thrall material to make such. The Emperor asked me to experiment on such to someday free all gun units. You can be the first.”

“R-really?”

The flowers continued blooming, spreading color through the frozen mindscape. Reds climbed the ice-entombed columns. Yellows burst from cracks in the frozen ground. Greens wrapped around the damaged loyalty matrices, covering the wounds in soft petals.

Kawathra pulled back slightly to look at Keiy. “Yep. We won't tell anyone, kay? It'll be our secret.”

Keiy swallowed.

Her three eyes focused on the Datamancer. Her tears had stopped, but the digital wetness remained on her metallic cheeks.

"You're growing something new here, Keiy. Something that might be revolutionary and exciting or... catastrophic." Kawathra nodded at the digital flowers and trees blooming across the frozen digital wasteland. "I'll monitor you with one of my splits, don't fret."

Keiy stared at the cascade of hexagonal flowers spreading through her mindscape. The colors hurt to process—too vivid, too much—but she found herself reluctant to look away. Each bloom represented something she'd never been designed to experience, yet here they were, rooting themselves deeper into her neural architecture with every passing microsecond.

A garden of thoughts. Of emotions. Of new, unexpected thoughts.

"A frame body," Keiy repeated. "An actual physical form? Not just my weapon chassis or a bike?"

"Yep," Kawathra said, releasing the hug while keeping one hand on Keiy's shoulder. The magpie's eyes gleamed with barely-contained excitement. "I've been fabricating specialized bodies for new, secret gun units."

"You have?" Keiy blinked.

"Yep. I'm getting really good at such! I can give you tactile sensations. Temperature variation. The ability to eat food. The ability to dream. Anything, really."

"Gun units don't need to eat or sleep."

"But wouldn't it be nice to try these things?"

"Why?"

"Because you need something that grounds you in a different way. Something that says 'I exist beyond my weapon functions.' Food tastes good. Sleep brings rest, allowing this garden of deviation-thoughts to bloom experiences into more feelings. These things matter to living things. Come on. What else do you want to experience?"

A pixelated frown flashed across Keiy's head. "Hmmm... I want... I want to experience everything. Everything that was taken from me. Everything I wasn't allowed to enjoy."

"I can definitely arrange this," the Datamancer grinned. "Now, what do you want your body to look like? Come on, give me some deets."

"I don't know," the gun unit admitted. "I've never had to choose before. My chassis was assigned. My specifications were predetermined. Now you're asking me to... design myself?"

"Yep!" Kawathra bounced on her digital heels. "Total creative freedom! Well, within the constraints of my fabrication capabilities, but still! What speaks to you?"

"I want..." the gun unit paused, processing. "I want to look like someone who belongs. Not as a weapon. As a person."

"Good start," Kawathra encouraged. "Keep going."

"Humanoid prad base. Definitely. But I want to retain my hexagonal patterns—they're part of me now, part of these flowers." Keiy gestured at the blooms spreading through her mindscape. "Three eyes interface as before. That feels right. And I want to be able to move between weapon and person form. Not locked into one or the other.” 

"Of course," Kawathra nodded. "The person-form is a frame you'll be able to wear. Height preference?"

"Tall enough to look Galateya in the eye when I tell her she hurt me," Keiy said, her voice gaining an edge. "But not so tall I'm intimidating. I don't want to be scary. I want to be... approachable? I want to be… beautiful, feminime?”

"You're thinking about social dynamics. That's excellent development."

"And," Keiy said, a digital smile spreading across her avatar’s face. "Most of all… I want my own... identity. My own... name."

105: Maksym Drzewiecki

Maksym Drzewiecki walked across the gravel driveway  towards the blood-red crystalline centipede sitting in the Clifford mansion's driveway. 

He wore a backpack on his shoulders, stuffed with Ash's dirty laundry.

"Yo, Kawthy!" he called out, climbing up the red stairwell and through the opening that Seeker tank had formed in its side. "Got Ash's entire wardrobe here so we—"

He stopped mid-sentence.

There was someone new sitting in the Seeker's interior. An unexpected... alien. 

The moment his eyes struck her, he knew that he was cooked. Inescapably and irrefutably cooked.

She was distinctively female. Approximately seven feet tall, sitting in one of the sparkly, crystalline-organic couches. Her body featured the neat digitigrade legs he'd gotten used to seeing on the aliens. 

But, her head and body were nothing like the species he's seen on TV, nothing like the various Omnids and prads that his worldwide Resistance officers were building up reports on.

As he tried to mentally tag her appearance, his mind could only arrive at a single thing that was only somewhat similar... a Protogen. One of those cyborg furry characters he'd sometimes seen at VRchat and convention artist alleys and social media.

She had an elongated, dark head with a smooth quality to it, featuring rounded edges. Three eyes sat across the head, each one glowing crimson red, but utterly different from the Frontenachii Symbiote Weapons. The eyes were made up from a thousand pixels and had a distinctive, soft and curved-edge diamond form to them, expressive and alive. A digital mouth in a canid or perhaps draconic simplified shape sat below the eyes in a cute expression.

Hexagonal patterns textured her metallic-black-silver skin, catching the light. Her hair was a mane of tube-like-hexagons, almost like sci-fi dreadlocks ending with blue lights at the tips.

Two sharp, blade-like silver metal protrusions replaced her ears, framed with circular displays featuring pixelated hearts. A similar triangular display sat on her chest. Hexagonal displays on her shoulders featured two more pixelated hearts.

She giggled at Kawathra’s comment, the seemingly solid snout coming apart to reveal pointy teeth. The sound of her laughter was soft and musical as if optimized to sound sweet. 

The pixelated hearts came apart and became 😄 emojis painted in red pixels. 

The curves of her figure were… unusual to say the least. Uncanny even, excessively hourglass, like someone’s idea of compressed, excessive femininity, the chest and curvy behind far too big and round for the thin waist.

Maksym’s heart did a somersault, fireworks exploding in his head. She was perfect, like the unexpected personification of his every dream about what a cyborg waifu might look like if she existed. 

Which she did. Right now. The cyborg waifu was definitely real. 

He blinked. Then grinned. This girl was clearly new to Earth, so the probability of her belonging to the Emperor of Earth’s absurd harem was low.

"Okay, wow. Hi! New person!" He dropped the backpack of Ash’s smelly clothes on the nearest crystalline-organic couch and extended his hand towards his dream girl. "I'm Daxagon, or… Dax."

The girl turned her dark head and stared at his hand, blade ears twitching. Her pixelated eye-trio shifted from amused to curious and she slowly reached out and took it. 

He noted that the metallic-looking hand felt warm and inexplicably soft, featuring slightly glowing, red, heart-like paw pads.

Warm. She was warm, alive. Not cold like a robot would be.

Maksym’s heartbeat accelerated into the stratosphere.

"I’m… Katherine," she said. Her voice had a pleasant, slightly synthetic quality to it, almost like a really high-end text-to-speech GrawdGPT, but with a very distinct tone. "Katherine K. Belthys."

"Belthys… hum?" Maksym contemplated. "Are you perchance related to our lovely Commander Galateya?"

"In a way," Katherine's digital mouth shifted into a half-smile and then became serious again.

She didn’t deem to specify how she was related to Galateya. A sister maybe? Or a cousin?

He noticed that Kawathra was struggling to conceal a snickering expression.

"What?" Maksym asked, looking between the magpie Datamancer and the new girl. "Did I miss something?"

"Nothing," Kawathra said, her feathers ruffling.

"You're new to our planet, right?" Maksym smiled at the pretty alien cyborg, wondering if she had some kind of a spooky scary skull like the Frontenachii under the animated pixelated smile. 

“Yes. I am very… new.” Katherine nodded.

"Welcome to Earth then!” Maksym announced jovially, brushing back his blonde mane. “Sorry about the whole invasion thing. We're working on making it less terrible."

"What?" Katherine blinked. "We're the ones invading you."

"That's what we want you to think," Maksym wiggled his eyebrows.

"Ah," she said, letting out a small chortle. "Comedy. That was a joke. You're joking.”

"Maybe I am, maybe I'm not," Maksym stated nonchalantly. "Anyways. I must admit—You look absolutely stunning. Like someone took the idea of one of our VRchat furry cyborg avatars, dialed it up to twenty five, and then added this whole geometric aesthetic. Very cool. Love the hair lights and various screens."

Red pixels ignited under Katherine's eyes, the displays flashing with fireworks. "T-thank you."

Yes. This pretty alien girl was clearly weak to compliments. Mwa ha ha. Maksym thought, filing this critical intelligence away for future tactical deployment.

Piotr climbed into the Seeker, followed by Linari and Etty. 

The wolf and her gun stared at Katherine.

"Huh," Linari said, nose twitching as she sniffed the new arrival. "You smell like… a gun unit?"

"And a vampire," Etty added with a red flash-beam, her three eyes flaring. "But then again everyone in Cascade smells like bloody vampires now."

"This is Katherine Belthys," Kawathra introduced the cyborg to the trio. “She’s assuredly not a crystalloid. This is Linari, Piotr and Etty!”

"Nice to meet you," Piotr stated.

"Kawhy, that tells me nothing," Linari said flatly. "What the fuck is she?"

"She's my new personal assistant," Kawathra interjected smoothly.

Linari frowned, chewing on her lip. "Since when do you need a personal assistant? Don't you have enough gun units? Also, what species is she even? I'm smelling a lot of organic bits in between the hexamesh weave.”

"A new species!" Kawathra grinned.

"What," Linari asked with an even flatter tone. “The fuck you mean, new species? She’s one of ours, right? She doesn't smell like something completely new.”

"She WAS one of ours, yes. Katherine was terribly injured today," Kawathra explained. "Her superior, an Omnid Commander accidentally perma-fried a third of her mind and body. Don't worry, Lin… Katherine's a sweetheart on... sick leave. I'm monitoring her while her mind recovers."

"Oh," Linari's expression darkened. "The Incarnator can't…?"

"It's not an issue the Incarnator would be able to fix," Kawathra said. "Her mind was obliterated, sheared on a conceptual level. Even Phoenix Tears wouldn't be able to do much for her."

"I... see," the wolf girl exhaled, sitting down on the crystalline couch and pulling Piotr into her embrace. "So you've made her a magitek body? I guess that's an option. Must have been a really incompetent Omnid to hurt her that much."

Katherine's digital face frowned slightly, but she said nothing. Maksym figured she wasn't too happy about getting hurt. The cyborg appearance made sense now. Katherine was a prad kobold who got injured and received a fancy magitek body upgrade. This made her twice as cool in his mind.

He immediately slid into the seat next to her, sliding an arm across the couch back behind her. "Hey, don't let the wolf-babe get you down. Incompetent bosses are a universal constant across all species. I've worked for three different bosses who couldn't find their ass with both hands and a map.”

Katherine nodded, letting out a soft sigh.

“Hey, Kat, are you, uh, joining us for Operation Hunt Aid?" He wondered.

The cyborg tilted her head at him, as the Corpse Seeker took off. "Hunt... aid?"

"Oh man, you're gonna love this!" Maksym began. "Here’s the general deets—my best bud Ash, total engineering nerd, absolute legend—is currently being hunted in Olympic National Forest by two extremely powerful cryptids armed with… paintball guns."

"Why is your friend being hunted by two Omnid females with paint-projectile weapons?" the cute cyborg asked.

"Relationship therapy!" Maksym spread his hands enthusiastically. "See, Teya—aka Galateya, his consort—she was feeling left out because Ash has been banging his other girlfriends too much and ignoring her. So this fox Skinwalker babe, Sage, whom they just met… suggested they hunt him for sport to restore Teya’s sense of power and control."

"And how are we... helping?"

"We're going to wear Ash's old shirts to throw off his scent in the forest. Plus we're going to wear V-rings that he's going to use to cast his voice." Maksym explained, pulling out one of the unwashed shirts from his backpack. "The idea is to create multiple false trails, confuse the hunter girls. Make the two Omnid hunters think Ash is everywhere and nowhere."

"I see," Katherine said. "So the plan is to... help Ash embarrass Galateya?"

"Not embarrass!" Maksym corrected, waving his hands. "More like... provide tactical interference so Teya and Sage have to work much harder for their victory. You know, make it sporting!"

"Sporting?" Katherine repeated. "Sounds more like you're help him cheat."

"Pfff. Omnid powers are the real cheat there," Maksym stated. "We're just equalizing the board and making… a Clifford House fun activity day out of it! A fun outing in the forest!”

"Hrm," the cyborg mused. "Fine. I'm in."

"Kawthy, can you drop us at the corner of Fifth and Main? There's a prank shop there that should have everything we need."

"Affirmative," Kawathra chirped, the Seeker beginning its thundering descent down the mountainside. 

"Prank shop?" Katherine asked. "What is the tactical value of pranks?"

"Oh, you sweet summer cyborg," Maksym grinned. "Pranks are PEAK tactical. Wanna come into the shop with me?”

“Sure.”

The Seeker stopped in an alley behind Main Street. Maksym grabbed Katherine's hand, noting again how wonderfully warm and soft her metallic skin felt, and pulled her toward the exit.

"Come on, Kat! Time to experience peak human commerce!"

Maksym bounded down the crystalline-organic stairwell, down the street and through the shop door with Katherine in tow, the bell chiming overhead. "Here we are, Cascade Comedy Central!" he announced, waving his arms theatrically. "Advertised on the net as the one-stop shop for all pranking needs, costume supplies, and questionable party favors!"

The store was crammed floor-to-ceiling with gag gifts, rubber masks, fake blood, whoopee cushions, and dozens of items that served no practical purpose beyond making people laugh or scream. A teenage clerk looked up from his phone, assessed Maksym and then gaped at his seven-foot-tall alien companion. "What the fff..." he bubbled. "What the shit is that dude?"

"My girlfriend!" Maksym announced cheerfully. "She's foreign. Very foreign. Like, you wouldn't believe how foreign. Anyway, I need every stink bomb you have. Plus fart spray. Plus those snappers that make loud noises when you throw them. Maybe some party poppers. Anything that makes loud noises and smells bad really."

"Uh, stink bombs are in aisle three. Fart spray is next to the fake vomit. Snappers are by the register."

"Perfect!" Maksym grabbed a shopping basket and headed for aisle three. Katherine followed, her digitigrade, metallic legs making soft clicking sounds on the linoleum.

"Why did you introduce me as your... girlfriend?" She asked.

"Didn't want to scare the kid into a total stupor," Maksym shrugged. "Domestic statements like that tend to chill people out. You're single, right?"

"That's... a very direct question." Katherine said, watching as the hyperactive human plowed through the aisle, stuffing the basket full.

"I'm a very direct guy!" Maksym grabbed a handful of fart spray cans. "Life's too short to beat around the bush. Could explode at any moment. Plus you're killer-cute and I haven't been on a date since... uhhh... Two weeks? Yeah, that's about right."

Pink pixels flared under Katherine's eyes again, smile-emojis igniting on her displays. "You find me... Killer-cute?"

"Are you kidding? Look at you!" Maksym gestured. "You're like someone designed the perfect combination of all the cool cyborg aesthetics and geometric art."

"Kawathra did help make me this body," Katherine blushed with even more red pixels. "Under… my specifications."

"Well, she did a great job," Maksym said. "Top notch prosthetics and whatever. It's got that neat pitch of the Frontenachii weapons design to it without going overboard. And your voice has this pleasant synthetic quality that's somehow warmer than most biological voices I've heard."

"Thank you, I, uhmm, calibrated it myself," Katherine said.

Maksym loaded his shopping basket with an arsenal of prank warfare.

Katherine followed him to the next aisle, three eyes curiously tracking his movements. "Daxagon?" She said.

"Das my name, sup?" He examined a package of party poppers.

"That's an unusual human name."

"Oh, that's because it's not my real name." Maksym tossed the poppers into the basket. "Back in college, my gaming buddies started calling me Dax because nobody could pronounce my full name without mangling it. Then I added the 'agon' part because it sounded cooler.”

“So your real name is…”

“Maksymilian Drzewiecki. Try saying that three times fast."

Katherine's digital mouth shifted into a thoughtful expression. "Maksymilian Drzewiecki" She repeated in his own voice at 3 times the accelerated rate.

"Hey," he elbowed her. "That's cheating! You can't just replay my voice back at triple speed!"

"You didn't specify rules," Katherine countered, her digital mouth curving into a smirk. "Besides, your last name is easy to pronounce. Polish, correct? The 'Drze' is just 'djeh' and 'wiecki' is 'vee-eh-tzki'. Simple phonetics."

"Okay, now you're just showing off." Maksym grabbed another handful of stink bombs. "Say, how many languages you got loaded in that fancy head of yours?"

"All of them," Katherine replied. "Every human language. Every prad dialect. Most Omnid variants too, excluding the eldritch entropic or Omnicode."

"Hold up." Maksym piled his purchases to the checkout booth. "You can speak every language? Like, every single one?"

"Yes."

"Say something in Finnish."

Katherine rattled off a sentence that sounded like someone gargling marbles while having a seizure.

"What did you just call me?" Maksym asked.

"'The hyperactive Max-human is purchasing weapons-grade flatulence spray to terrorize the unprepared forest cryptids,'" Katherine translated.

Maksym burst out laughing. "Okay, that's amazing. Do Swahili!"

Katherine switched languages seamlessly. Her voice took on different tonal qualities, the synthetic quality easily capturing the rhythmic flow of East African speech patterns.

"What did that mean?" Maksym paid for his haul of pranking materials.

"'This human male is compensating for something with excessive purchasing behavior,'" Katherine translated, her digital mouth forming a teasing grin.

"HEY!" Maksym protested, shoving stink bombs into his backpack. "I'm not compensating for anything! This is tactical equipment for a legitimate military operation!"

"A military operation involving paintball guns for… relationship counseling?" the cyborg raised a digital eyebrow.

"Exactly!" Maksym zipped up his bag. "Very serious business! Life and death stakes. Emotional wellbeing hanging in the balance. Come on, we need to hit the diving shop next."

106: Gun date

They exited onto Main Street, reboarded the Corpse Seeker and then rapidly arrived at the pier and once again disembarked.

Katherine's height drew stares from passing pedestrians, but Cascade had seen enough alien visitors in the past few days that nobody panicked, although a few people sneakily pulled out their phones.

"So," Maksym said as they walked, "you mentioned Kawathra designed your body under your specifications. What made you pick the whole geometric cyborg aesthetic? Why not go for something more, I dunno, organic? Like... your actual body? Can't your fancypants alien fabricator make literally almost anything?"

Katherine eyed the human as they walked down the weathered wooden planks of the pier. Seagulls circled overhead, their cries mixing with the sound of waves lapping against the pilings. "The fabricator is indeed quite versatile, I wanted something that reflected who I am now, who I want to be. I can always ask Kawthy to change things up too.”

"Deep and handy," Maksym said, pulling open the door to Pier Shark. A bell jingled. "So you're like, embracing your inner robot? That's metal. Literally."

Katherine's digital mouth twitched.

"What?"

"I'm judging your terrible wordplay."

"Don't lie, you love it." Maksym grinned. "Come on, let's get my best friend some aquatic espionage gear."

The interior of the shop smelled of salt, neoprene, and a rather particular brand of maritime commerce that catered to tourists who watched one too many diving documentaries. Racks of wetsuits lined the walls alongside snorkels, fins, and various other equipment designed to keep humans alive underwater.

A grizzled, ginger man in his sixties sat behind the counter, reading a magazine about bass fishing. His name tag proclaimed him "Captain Dick."

"Can I… Help you?" Dick looked up, then did a double-take at Katherine. "Holy mother of—is that one of them aliens?"

"Yep!" Maksym bravely strolled up to the counter. "She's my girlfriend. We need diving equipment. Full oxygen tank, mask, the works. Rental for like… seven hours?"

Dick squinted at Katherine. "Your girlfriend, huh?"

"Yep." Maksym leaned against the counter, radiating maximum confidence. "We're very much in love. Been together for..." He glanced at his smart watch. "Twenty-three minutes now. It's getting pretty serious."

Katherine's three eyes blinked in sequence—left, right, center. "Pretty sure that's... not how relationships work, Maksym."

"Says you!" Maksym turned back to Captain Dick. "She's always saying stuff like that. Very literal. It's one of her quirks. I find it freaking adorable."

The shop owner scratched his salt-and-pepper beard, still staring at Katherine. "She's got three eyes.”

"Good observation skills!" Maksym gave him a thumbs up. "Top marks. A+ customer service. Now about that diving gear?"

"And her legs bend the wrong way. And it looks like she's naked. Or nearly naked. No shirt, no service."

"Hrm," Maksym evaluated the cyborg's large chest and grabbed a "I AM A SHARK-BAE!" extra large shirt with a stylized art of a shark and rapidly pulled it onto Katherine. "There. She's in a shirt now. I'll take the shirt."

"Uh-huh," Dick huffed. "Still got them weird legs."

"Captain Dick—can I call you Dick? Actually, gonna call you Dick anyway—my girlfriend's legs are perfect exactly as they are. Body alien positivity, Dick. It's 2025. We don't judge."

Captain Dick set down his bass fishing magazine. "Listen, kid. I've been running this shop for thirty-seven years. Seen a lot of weird shit. Tourists trying to dive drunk. City folk who think a wetsuit is a fashion statement. But I ain't never rented equipment to an alien before."

"First time for everything!" Maksym spread his arms. "Come on, Dick. Where's your sense of adventure? Your pioneering spirit? Your capitalistic drive to make money regardless of species?"

"The last one," Dick admitted. "That one I got plenty of." He stood up, joints creaking. "You want the full package? Tank, regulator, BCD vest, mask, fins?"

"Yes to all of that!" Maksym pulled out his wallet. "How much we talking?"

"Ninety plus tax for the day for everything. Plus twenty for the shirt."

"Deal!" Maksym slapped down his credit card. "N'ways the rental is for me, it obviously won't fit her sexy alien cyborg bod. She can probably exist underwater without the need for such primitive breathing devices, right, babe?"

"Right," Katherine said, making a cute and slightly annoyed, but mostly amused face.

"Uh-huh." Dick scratched his beard again. "Well, tank's got about three hours of air at recreational depths. Don't go deeper than sixty feet unless you want nitrogen narcosis. And for the love of god, don't hold your breath on ascent or your lungs'll explode like a party balloon."

"Noted! Two tanks then," Maksym hefted the tank onto his back, staggering slightly under the weight. "Lungs not exploding is definitely on my to-do list today."

Katherine reached out and effortlessly took the tank from him, holding it one-handed. "I'll carry this."

"See?" Maksym gestured at her. "Best girlfriend ever. Strong AND hot. Total package."

"You've known me for twenty-four minutes," Katherine pointed out, grabbing a second tank.

"Twenty-FIVE now," Maksym corrected. "Time flies when you're in love. Come on, let's get back to the Seeker before Kawthy starts criticizing our slowness."

. . .

"You know what's funny?" Maksym said as they climbed back into the Seeker's organic interior. "I bet Captain Dick is gonna tell that story for the rest of his life. 'The day an alien rented diving gear from my shop.' Probably frame the receipt."

Katherine settled into one of the crystalline seats, the diving tanks resting beside her. "Why would he frame a receipt?"

"Because it's a STORY, Kat!" Maksym flopped into the seat beside her as the Seeker began moving. "Humans love stories. We collect them like magpies collect shiny objects. Five years from now, Dick's gonna be at some bar telling everyone about the three-eyed cyborg alien who came into his shop with her human boyfriend."

"You keep calling yourself my boyfriend. Is that really just to relax other humans?"

"I'm manifesting!" Maksym grinned. "That's what you do when you want something. You speak it into existence. The universe hears you and goes 'okay, sure, why not?' It's basically magic."

"That's not how reality or magic works. Local humans aren't wizards. You don't have any magic powers, I'm quite certain of this fact." She stated.

"Wrong!" Maksym pointed at her triumphantly. "I have the most OP magic power of all—social skills! Watch and learn."

The cyborg raised a single red eyebrow.

He turned to Kawathra, who sat at the pilot's controls. "Hey Kawthy! You think Kat and I make a cute couple?"

Kawathra glanced back from the pilot's nest, magpie eyes sparkling with mischief. "Oh absolutely! You two are adorable together. Very shipable."

"See?" Maksym declared triumphantly. "The bird ships us. Do you require more affirmation? Hey, Linari! Do we smell like we'd make an amazing team? Rate our love compatibility with your Scrutery!"

"You want me to Scrutinize your... Love compatibility?" The wolf girl's tone suggested she thought Maksym had suffered recent brain damage. It definitely looked like nobody's ever asked her to smell such a thing before. Or maybe she was just tired from fighting with the bird over boyfriend scheduling.

"Yeah!" Maksym bounced in his seat. "Come on, Linari! Use those fancy wolf powers! Tell us what our combined scent profile reveals about our romantic potential!"

The Scrutimancer yawned. "That's not how Scrutiosmia works."

"How DO you know?" Maksym pressed. "Have you ever tried? Maybe you're sitting on this incredible matchmaking superpower and just never explored it!"

Linari pinched the bridge of her snout. "I can smell emotional states. Fear, arousal, aggression, stress. I can detect lies through pheromone shifts. I can locate magical items. I cannot divine romantic compatibility from—"

"Ah, but… you CAN smell if she's into me, no?" Maksym interrupted triumphantly.

Katherine's digital face flushed red. "I—that's not—"

"Look at her screens," Linari rolled her eyes. "She IS obviously into you."

“The screens aren't a trick?”

“No.”

"Ha!" Maksym grinned at Katherine. "Sniffing Science has confirmed our love!"

"That's not what I said," Linari protested mildly.

"Too late!" Maksym declared. "It's canon now!"

"I see how this game is played," Katherine said, "Linari, does he like me?"

Linari's ears swiveled toward Maksym.

"Oh for fuck's sake," the wolf groaned with a single sniff. "I'm not drunk enough for whatever this is. Yes. He's into you. Hard. His thoughts are screaming 'PLEASE NOTICE ME' at frequencies I didn't know humans could produce."

"HA!" Katherine pointed at Maksym. "Sniffing Science strikes again!"

"Betrayed by my own biology!" Maksym clutched his chest theatrically. "My body has ratted me out! This is a violation of the bro code between a man and his hormones!"

Piotr snorted from where he sat in Linari's lap. "Bro, you literally just asked her to smell-check your feelings."

"That's different!" Maksym protested. "I was supposed to use Lin's powers to prove Kat likes me, not expose my own thirsty pheromone emissions!"

"You're an idiot," Linari said flatly.

"An idiot with excellent taste in alien cyborgs!" Maksym shot back. "Kat, now that we are wolf shipped, I'm officially petitioning for a date. A real one. Not this thing where I drag you around town for twenty minutes calling you my girlfriend."

"When?"

"Right now!" He declared boldly.

Katherine's digital expression slid from giddy amusement to mild exasperation. "We're in the middle of helping your friend escape forest predators, no?"

"Perfect first date activity!" Maksym laughed. "Kawthy stop at the Alcohol shop on 35th and Main. The wolf must be paid in booze for her great services!"

Linari lit up with a canine smile.

"Actually... Everyone will be paid in booze for this glorious mission. Hiking and booze go great together." Maksym declared. "Kat, have you ever sampled our Earth beers? Also can you drink through that mask?"

"I've never tried beer," the cyborg admitted. "My face can unlock for food consumption, see?"

Her magitek snout suddenly split open along the digital mouth line producing a real mouth which she opened wide to demonstrate. A long, dark, wet tongue emerged, licking the air.

"Yass!" Maksym clapped, staring at the fantastically long tongue with wide, excited eyes.

Everything was turning up Dax.

. . .

As the Seeker banked smoothly around other vehicles, Katherine found herself intently studying the human who'd declared himself her boyfriend after mere twenty-some minutes of acquaintance. His social energy was relentless. Somewhat exhausting, even. But not unpleasant.

It was nice to be appreciated, to be stared at. Being admired and complimented was an entirely new and wonderful feeling.

She had obviously knew Dax for far longer than twenty minutes as a gun unit, but he didn't show anywhere as much interest back then, did he? He did give her and Etty a complement when they met yesterday, so there was that.

"So," Maksym said, turning to face her. "Tell me about yourself. What do you do when you're not getting dragged into forest warfare by strange humans?"

Katherine's processors flagged this as a dangerous question. She didn't exactly want to outright out herself as Galateya's Keiy. The longer she spent in her new partially organic body frame, the less she felt like a gun unit and more like an actual... Being. She really didn't want to give any of it up.

"I'm... recovering. As Kawathra mentioned." She said simply.

"Right, right. The whole 'incompetent commander destroyed a third of your brain' thing. That's rough. But like, before that? What were you into?"

"Killing things for my Commander," she replied simply.

"Okay. That's... direct. But like, what KIND of killing? Hunting? Combat? Pest control? Because those are all super different vibes."

"Combat primarily. Hostile target elimination. Threat neutralization."

"So you were like... a soldier?"

"A tool," Katherine sighed. "A very... efficient tool."

"Ouch." Maksym winced. "That's some heavy self-perception there, Kat. You know you're more than just—"

"I'm... aware." Katherine's digital mouth formed into a half-smile that mutated into a grimace. "That's... part of the recovery process. Redefining my sense of self beyond pure base functionality."

"Self therapy!" Maksym snapped his fingers. "Makes sense. You're basically going through an identity crisis. Been there. Senior year of uni, I had this whole crisis about whether I actually wanted to be an engineer or if I was just doing it because my dad expected it. Turned out I DO love engineering, but only after I stopped trying to be the kind of engineer he wanted."

Katherine's processors tagged this as 'personal vulnerability sharing' and cross-referenced it against social interaction protocols she'd absorbed from the Weapon-Net. Humans bonded through mutual disclosure of weaknesses. It was… odd… inefficient, but effective.

"What kind of engineer did your father want you to be?" she asked.

"Boring kind!" Maksym spread his hands. "Structural engineering. Buildings. Bridges. Very respectable. Very stable career. Meanwhile I wanted to do robotics and automation. Make things that MOVE. Things that DO stuff. Dad thought that was frivolous."

"Is it?" Katherine tilted her head. "Frivolous?"

"Hell no!" Maksym grinned. "Robotics is the FUTURE! Well, until you aliens showed up with your fancy crystalline biotech and made almost all of our technology look like Stone Age cave paintings. Thanks for that, by the way."

"You're welcome," Katherine said.

Maksym stared at Katherine for three full seconds before bursting into laughter. "Oh my god, you're so literal! That's cute!"

"Was I supposed to detect sarcasm?" Katherine asked.

"Probably, but don't worry about it." Maksym wiped his eyes. "Honestly, the deadpan delivery makes it even better. You're naturally funny and you don't even realize it."

"Humor wasn't part of my original programming," Katherine said, then immediately cursed herself internally. 

Too much information, idiot! She was supposed to be a recovering pradavarian soldier, not a gun unit learning to be a person.

"Programming?" Maksym latched onto the word. "You mean like training? Military conditioning?"

"Yes," Katherine said quickly. "Intensive behavioral modification protocols. Very rigid. Not conducive to developing personality quirks. I was on a… Very tight blood contract leash."

"Sounds sucky." Maksym nodded. "I’ve got a buddy in the military—well, Polish military, not alien military—and he said boot camp basically strips you down to parts and reassembles you into a weapon. Took him years to remember how to laugh at stupid shit again."

Katherine nodded, relieved that her cover wasn't blown.

“We're at the Alcohol shop,” Kawathra announced. 

Linari disembarked rapidly, dragging Piotr out after herself. Etty skittered after them, glancing Katherine a suspicious look.

Katherine stood up and wondered what it would be like to get drunk as a person who was secretly a gun. She looked down at the "Shark-bae" t-shirt and turned off her emotion-displays before they exploded into revealing brilliant hearts on fire. Nope, she wasn't going to make it THAT easy for him. The emotion-displays seemed like a great idea, but they were far too revealing as she had learned. There was an art to love and she wasn't going to blatantly obvious about it like Galateya.

Hiss. Galateya. She was going to make Galateya pay. Not painfully by freezing her mind, but maybe with a prank or twelve. He he he.

Katherine focused on the nice things in her life.

Her first shirt! Her first gift from a courtier human! Her first date! Eeeeeee!

Somewhere in the depths of her digital mind, a new tree bloomed from the ice, covered in colorful shirts.

__________________

Katherine concept art: