(Rewritten) Ch. 135 – Takes One To Know One

"O statue of the forest, what wisdom dost thou impart?" asked Hecate of Chthonia.

"K = ½mv²," answered the Statue of the Forest cryptically.

"Or; the higher you raise the space-concrete buttplug, the wider its crater," added the Statues' other voice, not so cryptically.

-- Statue of the Forest, 2057

***

For a moment I just stared. The eyes that met mine had been so unexpected that all thought fled my mind.

Another part of me was automatically readying itself for a fight. It had fallen back on old instincts, and older training. That the woman on her plinth was a good head taller than me and looked down at me didn't help.

Then she opened her mouth, and out came a high-pitched, comical, "Nnni!"

My mouth fell open. "Huh?" I asked intelligently.

The woman answered by stretching, rubbing her neck, and bending over towards me. In a completely different voice, a male one, she said, "Ten thousand years will give you such a crick in the neck!"

"What?" At least my body got the message that I probably wasn't in a fight. The instant battle-sweat dried up before it managed more than a few testing advances down my flanks.

I still couldn't make heads or tails of the woman's words. And I knew what heads or tails were. I had both. I'd had both in other variants, too.

Leah palmed her face next to me with a nice, meaty smack. "Of course she's a Nerd. Fucking whacko samurai," she grumbled so quietly I needed my antennae to hear her. It kinda sounded like she'd capitalized the n-word there.

Apparently it wasn't quiet enough, because the woman suddenly fwipped over next to Leah with a move that smelled half kinetic and half esoteric—not that I would've been able to define what that meant exactly, besides samurai bullshit tech.

She smiled cheekily, hands clasped behind her back and bouncing on her toes. "Oh, but it takes one to know one, yes?" she smugged.

Leah blushed.

Wait a FUCKING second.

I stared at her.

Leah noticed. Her eyes strayed guiltily.

No fucking way.

Fwip right next to me.

My head whipped around. The woman was there, arms stretched towards me with clawed fingers. Weird stoney angel wings rose above her shoulder, fangs bared in a grotesque mask of a rictus, eyes blind as if they were hewn from stone. Before I could catch myself, my fist rocketed up towards her chin.

Ten thousand times had I practiced this particular motion. Practice turned instinct, instinct guided my joints on rails. Foot led, planted solidly. Thigh built power, hip slid forward and transmitted it into the shoulder. Arm close to the body, elbow in, fist tight, knuckles connecting to target's chin.

I'd put everything my body had into it. Even fired the Second Wind's jets at full burst.

There was an extremely loud metallic gong as I struck her, and a nasty crack. She barely even rocked. My knuckles hurt. The pain supercharged my nervous system, sent my brain into go-go-go mode. I bit my tongue to stay still. My broken hand burned.

"Don't you know you're not supposed to look away from the weeping angel?"

"Huh?" I needed a new confusion-meter. Mine was broken.

I'm sorry, said Tynea.

"Huh?" And a lexicon. The random interjections were giving me whiplash.

I underestimated your combat training. I did not expect that you would be capable of extracting such force from your muscles so efficiently. I would have suggested a tougher skin during your creation.

I worked my mouth, unsure what to say.

"She's human, shaped like a human," I replied, as if that explained anything. Maybe it did. Tynea was smart enough to puzzle it out.

***

Dolores carefully studied the tiny woman who'd just socked her. She was impressively fast. Her antennae had audibly whipped the air as they'd snapped into safety at her back, and her fist had driven for her chin with such speed that Dolores had yanked on her Class III 'Fleeting Stability' Gravity Hook on pure reflex.

Which appeared to have been the right reaction—the level of force behind that punch had been far beyond natural. She'd have gone catapulting through the trees. If she'd still been made of flesh, her jaw would've shattered, her brain splattered inside her skull, and her neck broken. She shuddered on the inside. She'd heard each bone as it broke inside the woman's fist. That wasn't exactly how she wanted to make their acquaintance.

Now the woman was visibly restraining herself, carefully controlling her breathing. Dolores smelled the metal, and other, more alien things, in the blood dripping from her knuckles. But there was a sweeter smell that punched through all of that, from lower down. It rather perplexed her.

Arousal? Why?

Even stranger, none of it showed on the small woman's face. There was just what Dolores would call an intense battle focus hidden behind a paper-thin veneer of passivity. Like it was only her body that was aroused, and not the person herself.

"Don't you know you're not supposed to look away from the weeping angel?" Dolores said, deciding to channel the awkwardness-turned-lethal into qualified Nerdiness. That always worked. Someway.

"Huh?"

Dolores giggled to herself. There was that adorable confusion again, drawing a cute scrunch between the smaller woman's brows. It made her want to pat her head, but she didn't intend to break the girl's other hand, not even via passive chin application.

So instead she dumped the energy coursing through her Fleeting Stability into the Class III 'Pious Renewal' Capacitor Network. Warm comfort seeped into her body as her skeletal integrity fields ramped up and the Class III 'Machine Spirit' Nanite Forge converted half of the surplus energy into shielding nanites to be stored against further attacks.

Sighing happily, Dolores took a step back. Probably best to disarm the small woman's tension. Interestingly, her antennae had twitched when Dolores rerouted her internal energies, and now, as Dolores spelled relaxation via body language, they too relaxed and slowly, carefully wafted forward.

Right towards several spots where her skin hid capacitors.

Those are really quite sensitive, huh? To penetrate my surfaces despite being passive.

Adymra helpfully provided his best guess of the specific model of antennae. They appeared to be high-end Class II organs. Dolores supposed it made sense that they'd be able to peer past her isobarriers, considering that they were both uncharged and low-end Class II. She'd either have to return to no-power mode, or divert energy towards her barriers and run silent, if she didn't want the girl to get a sense of her internals. Or even her very presence.

Dolores hoped that hiding like that wasn't going to be necessary. She didn't get to meet many samurai, particularly IRL, and she didn't want to have to find out what it was like to fight one.

…And somehow, a disquieted Dolores thought the girl did know how to kill humans.

Luckily, the battle readiness written across the shoulders of the woman diminished further as the larger woman rested a hand against her back.

Dolores had watched the two ladies approach and enjoyed their bond. The obvious shared intimacy, the partly playful, and partly attachment-seeking behavior. They certainly had some adorable dynamics between them.

She considered for a minute whether she should share the material she'd gathered with Himejoshi-chan, but, much as she hated it, figured that maybe that would be a breach of privacy that wasn't worth the trouble. These two weren't anime girls after all. A search of the Mesh had shown that they weren't well known, despite their Class II gear and the warstriders parked nearby. No trending names for either. Might be a sign of preference for privacy, and a lack of tolerance for leaked footage.

Poor Himejoshi-chan, she'll have to feed her gay jollies elsewise.

Dolores smiled cheerfully. She felt her Class I 'Sociality' Social Aid Scripts go to work on her expression, gentle the smile and tuck the awkward away. The result was an expression a lot less inhibited than she really felt.

It allowed her to take the shorter woman's hand without resistance. Dolores carefully laid it across her own palm and found that her knuckles had already stopped bleeding.

She's probably got some regenerative wetware…

She trickled a small amount of power into her active sensors to study the wounds. Dolores's medical protocols automatically used micro-bursts of radiation from the sensors to sterilize any bacteria or vira they detected around and within the injury, while far weaker emissions blanketed the hand for sensing.

Indeed there was a veritable army of little helpers knitting bone and tissue back together, or carrying nutrients and proteins wherever they were needed. They looked like tiny little jellyfish, nothing like Dolores's nano-machines.

Bionites, whispered Adymra, and shared some specifications.

Little jellyfish, whose streamers and tentacles had more functions than a HelveticPocketKnife™ and more ways to neutralize foreign invaders than the average battalion.

Nasty little fuckers, Dolores thought.

Well, at least it seemed that the hand would require no further attention. That was good.

When Dolores looked up again, she met the little one's eyes. Where previously there was anxious shyness followed by confusion, and then violence on a hair trigger tempered with the kind of self-control that even the crusaders of the village rarely developed, she found herself caught in a gaze that seemed to see right past the artificial mask of her machine body, all the way to the displaced loner that Dolores had once been…and perhaps still was.

In some ways.

***

I knew isolation when I saw it.

I wasn't sure what had tipped me off. Maybe it was something about the way that the samurai didn't meet my eyes unless she was…acting whatever role she'd chosen at the moment. Maybe it was the cant of her shoulders, or the body language she showed for microseconds before something artificial adjusted it whenever the stranger was preoccupied with anything but her behavior.

Whatever it was, I recognized the loneliness.

And that, combined with Leah's loving support, let me take a figurative step forward and introduce myself.

"Hi. I'm Tinea. How are you?"

***