"I'll run it by Stream and see if she can't help us get it set up. So - I get the feeling that I might have jinxed us. That is to say, all of my upgrades may wind up with us doing a lot more work."

"Haha! Don't tempt me~ Projects like that are a bit out-of-scale for me right now anyway, I've been brushing up against my limits, believe it or not. My main issue is that there's only so fast I can write, and even making my code more efficient there's limits on just how far I can take that." She considers. "...though, bases tend to be easier than compact stuff, once it's actually been built. File that away for later, though. I would need more than my dinky little mine and the crumbs doled out by the government."

She smiles. "Ain't it cool that you can say something ridiculous like that and I actually do have a potential pathway to accomplishing it?"

"I do not! Just about anything built with conventional electronics and materials can potentially be fabricated in my factories. Of course, I need to have the right materials, but I can make the right tools for any job. Then, of course, I'd have to improve on it, but I am an artist after all."

A cat-ear twitches as she catches a few interesting tweets about her, and she fires off a response. She's learned to take care lest she bring the wrath of the PR department, who have already asked her to stop tweeting quite as much and started to levy penalties. She lifts her free hand and projects a tweet, a shot someone took with a Nikon from a nearby building of Korrdes amid the rubble with robots coming at her.

"Can't bottle that genie without going full China, and while the president may wish he could be a dictator, he isn't yet."

She starts doing some CAD stuff in the air, using fingers and hand gestures to help her visualize a rock stage.

"So, how do you describe your style? In terms of relative genre."

It's not Egyptian, but that suits her fine. Melanie is the one performing, after all.

"So, anything on your schedule today?" She's still flushing bright, but her mask keeps that down.

"I have a lot of work to do in the lab today, but I wouldn't mind going out again a little later, if, uhm, that's cool with you?"

She tucks the design away and starts picking out a schedule for it. She'll need to book the venue, too, so she goes ahead and does that in advance, sending it to the administrator and CCing Hound-8, because she knows that without some pressure from someone with pull they're likely to stonewall her. A concert for the local teams would be a good morale building exercise and PR move.

"You know, I can't help but feel like we're on the verge of a storm," she says, pulling her legs up to her chest. "I am more productive than I've ever been, but I don't think it's going to be enough. I've been working on a firearm, because I don't think my little hand-zapper is going to be good enough, and I've been putting serious thought into a suit of Iron Man armor. I want to upgrade my cat to defend my mom if, gods forbid, something ever happened to her. Now there's this whole thing with our newest team member, and no one has any god-damned idea where that's going to go."

Then there's her secret friends, but she would never speak of them in anything approximating a public space. Or the fact that she built an AI.

"Aww, you flatter me." She rubs her neck and leans in to peck her on the cheek. The mask is remarkably warm - it's channeling body heat, after all - and she hops to her feet, feeling thrilled and flushed at the little act.

Just so much work to do. At the least, she can get to work on her pistol.

@jachra: 18-3d6 Radiance = 18-(1+3+2) = 12

Critical, increases margin to 24

Increases pistol value from 8 to 32, adding +1 pip of damage and RoF 5 and Armor Divisor (2). Also increases the stun effect to HT-3. 1 point is spare for future upgrades.

-------------------------------

Seshat actually manages to make pretty substantial progress on the pistol. She greatly enhances the laser's pulsing quality to let it tunnel through armor more rapidly without getting dispersed by evaporating material, and she's made the lasing mechanism a lot more rugged for sustained fire. All she has to do now is the surprisingly onerous task of enhancing the power channeling mechanism.

Mind, it's already pretty dangerous. She is testing it as Alyn enters the room, lining up her HUD with a target painted on a block of concrete at the far end of the warehouse. With the pistol held in a secure double grip, she fires a sustained burst.

There's no recoil, and no visible beam, but at the target point the concrete goes briefly incandescent with a faint bang! of superheated stone. It doesn't really penetrate significantly at this stage, though, just burrowing a deep, blackened hole. When an ear tilts and she notices Hound-8's approach, she lowers it to her waist, where it unfolds and forms into a white box chased with gold and lapis at her hip, like origami.

"Hey Alyn. How are you doing?"

She's never yet told anyone other than her research partners about her attempt to replicate Hound-8's design. Maybe she should tell the twins at some point, though.

"It's got a variable output. I can tune it from an electrolaser all the way up to its current maximum setting - I realized that I needed some kind of useful personal defense tool. Also, a little bit more of an efficient and powerful cutting laser than the one I have on my stylus."

She turns over to look at her, folding her hands before her. "I'm all right. Korrdes and my other friends are helping. I admit, it's a little frustrating. I spent a day of my life and work creating the body for a living shard - but it reminds me that a lot of what I do depends on the whims of others."

She considers, quietly. "Alys? There's something I wanted to let you and your sister know."

In the corners of the room, scarabs move to her wordless command, feeding false information to the microphones and obscuring what she's about to say.

"I've been experimenting in my free time. Kind of a constant deal with me."

She puts a hand to one of her compute nodes, running a finger along a glowing channel line, along the strange words phosphorescing with her essence. "I've noticed how my writing crudely - for now, I'm getting better - resembles the symbols that appear on people's bodies. And when you struck me, I got a pretty good look at yours. I tried to recreate, writing it on devices to try and see if I couldn't make it work. At first, I failed. I tried putting it on one of my creations, a cat, and couldn't get her to use it.

"Then, after I'd given up, she came up and started begging for pets, as she does. I did, of course - and as my hand started getting tired, I noticed that the ceiling fan was still, my mother's cooking had stopped, and I'd lost connection with my devices. When I examined her code, I'd found that she'd called an unknown function in pursuit of her desire to seek affection."

She rubs the back of her neck. "So, I suppose you'd call that a success."

It's a sobering reminder that just telling her was dangerous. Worse, it's an acknowledgement from someone she trusts and respects that it was, and that she could get in big trouble if it became known.

Why did she even want to tell them? What was she expecting out of it? Validation?

She desperately needs the validation of authority figures, especially with how she systematically distrusts them.

"I'm not sure how long it'll last, me pretending I am not more powerful than I appear. I managed to bargain SRS into letting me into their entire Shard database, which I've copied over, and I haven't even scratched the surface of that library." She smiles a little. "It's kind of amazing, you should try it. I - well, I guess it's too early to say, but I've been contemplating the possibility of being able to alter them in a living subject. If I can, if it's a possibility that... you and your sister might one day be able to be separated... is that something you'd be interested in?"

Oh, that's why she brought it up. Sometimes, she gets ahead of herself.

"I may be premature in offering it, but I just built a body for a girl from another dimension. If you have time after work, I'd like to meet with you and try something out. It could be potentially dangerous, but if I can understand the symbols - the potential benefits could be enormous."

"I would feel the same if someone did it to me." She nods up to her. "I don't think the original would be directly useful to me anyway." She frowns at her hands. Not that she'd have the first order of an inkling of an idea of how to splay hers out - and the issue whereby she's pretty sure that her shard was broken in half, and her true power would require somehow reclaiming what her father got.

"Did you get my message about the concert?"

"For what it's worth," she adds as she has the shabti clean up so she can go to lunch, "I don't think that when I recreate a shard it is the same shard. I thought about that regarding my own, but I realized that the conditions we're born with have a lot to do with how they manifest. If I could somehow recreate my seed in someone, it would grow in entirely different, and when I put yours on a metal plate, it isn't quite the same. We're unique manifestations."

She offers a smile. "I'm going to go eat and catch up with the others. Thanks for chatting."

She steps off, letting the buzzing die down, and shoots a message off to Korrdes. [Hey, so, something I noticed after Shamsa's rebirth is that she was able to 'take over' the functions of my Infrastructure. I'm wondering if I can get your guitar to be self-powered by you. If I can, I won't have to diminish myself to gift people anymore, and you guys won't have a sudden outage if I should strain myself. Wanna meet up for lunch and try experimenting after?]

To Kin-and-Six she adds. [I'd like to start reviewing the data you pulled from SRI. In particular, instances of what are believed to be a single shard ending up in two or more people, such as the wolf pups. I'm thinking about the half of mine that's in my father, in particular, but others as well. Also, please get in touch with R&D and see if you can't improve upon the musical database. Start applying them to the shards we have on file from SRI.]

Speak of the devil, she spies R&D in the hallway and jogs to catch up. "Hey," she says, cat face smiling. "So... how'd your first date with Zosime go?"

[You are the cutest guinea pig!] Sometimes, she's a really dumb teenager when it comes to her girlfriend, but this is expected. [Shamsa is an alien lifeform, but you have an alien lifeform dwelling inside you, so I think there's a certain logic to that.]

A blush creeps unseen across her cheeks beneath the mask, at least until it reaches her ears.
"Pretty good. I never even knew I was into girls, but we seem to be getting along great so far."