(Rewritten) Ch. 52 – Mission Impossible

"The base measure is that one bar of pressure is required to push water to a height of 10 meters."

– The Complete Guide to Bathroom Water Pressure

***

I dragged Leah up the stairs, all the way to the torn doorway, and found that it was still dark outside, quite windy, and raining. Would have a hard time detecting any creepers nearby. No go.

I dragged Leah down the stairs, all the way to the facilities, and found that there was no spot meant for washing. No go.

I dragged Leah further down the stairs, all the way to the pantry, and found that there was no hidden door, no hidden niche for washing. "Fuck!"

I pouted. Leah laughed so hard she snorted while trying to talk through a lack of air, until she even teared up.

I wondered if I could somehow hijack her squirt gun…

No. The shower was more important. Escalation might lead to no showers. De-escalation was the correct move. Hmph.

I took a water bottle in one hand, Leah in the other, who was still giggling helplessly, and dragged them both back to the guard room, decided I needed a chair, and juggled everything and everybody around a little.

Bottle of water under one arm, chair in one hand, Leah in the other, I marched us up the stairs once more, trying very hard not to let the flailing legs and sleeves of Leah's Sleeve distract me from my mission. Shower.

I put the chair in a corner of the room that was already trashed from my explosions the previous day, kept the Hummingbird, told Tynea to scout for aliens near enough to detect Leah's clowning about, tossed the bathrobe into another corner, positioned Leah behind the chair with her hand up like a showerhead, sat on the chair, and pouted mightily at her over my shoulder.

My shower had broken. Obviously. I didn't think showers were supposed to be doubled over, laughing hysterically.

Time to call the plumber? Would they provide service out here? Probably not. Should I plumb her myself?

Uh, bad choice of words.

I decided to buy two more juice boxes, watching my points counter drop to three hundred thirty-five. One for me, one for Leah, falling into my waiting palms.

I carefully steered my antennae to hide behind my back where I bound them with my tail and smushed all the sensilla closed with the fluff. Then I took my box, pulled on the straw with my teeth to unseal it, and blew the billowing cloud of fragrant aroma towards Leah.

She froze for a moment as her stomach growled loudly, which forced a giggle from me, before her eyes fixated on the box in my other hand, the slit pupil of her Warforged eye making it look like she had sighted her prey.

Yep, this shit's that good.

I stretched it out towards her, she immediately snapped it up. With a quick movement, Leah sat herself sideways on my lap, and huffed juice. The laughter in her eyes arrested my attention…only for my sniffing puppies to distract us by making her sneeze.

Part of me reeled from the overpowering scents, and another watched as juice sprayed out of her nose, and idly considered if I should try pinching it shut.

What was that about plumbers, again?

"Sorry, Leah. Here, let me help." I said unsteadily, as I drunkenly braided a small, rather fuzzy rag and handed it to her. Didn't want to accidentally poke out her other eye while I was seeing double.

I once more took my antennae behind my back, fixing them again with my tail. The soft fur on it was a lot more gentle than my hands at getting the sprayed juices out of them and even served to isolate some of the direct contact between the sensilla and the air.

After Leah wiped her face clean, we worked on our meals in a companionable silence with only the occasional snicker.

I explored Leah's new thighs with my free hand and tested how the artificial muscles differed from natural ones. I marveled at the normal body temperature the legs had, and enjoyed Leah's blissful groan when I copied her earlier deep massage between those fibers.

Eventually, Leah got off my lap, tossed our empty boxes onto our garbage pile, and moved behind me. She tilted my head backwards a little, and began softly washing my hair.

I was a little nervous—this was how we'd caused Leah's flashback yesterday. It made it difficult to just relax and enjoy the kneading. Leah seemed to pick up on that, and whether it was because she thought the same, or perhaps to relieve my tension, she asked, "Tinea, is this your natural hair, or was it designed? The black—and how straight it is—makes me think you have some Asian in you."

I blew some air and forced my shoulders down. Put my soles flat on the ground to borrow some stability.

"Mhm, yeah. My mother was Asian. Korean, I think? I never met her, but that's what my father said, when I was really young. Said I had her hair."

"Oh? Ever see any pictures of her? Was she pretty?"

"I haven't, no. Everybody seemed to hate her, but they didn't say why. The hair thing is literally the only thing I know. When I skipped out, one of the first things I did was to see if I could track her down, but that quickly got much too expensive… Huh. Maybe that's an option, now? Haven't thought about her for a long while, to be honest."

As my thoughts drifted off towards that failure that'd forced me to accept that I simply hadn't had the resources to hack the gene databases, Leah slowly rinsed the lather out of my hair, and shook me out of my reverie when she deposited a dollop of soap into my hand, with the words, "Here, Tinea. Wipe yourself down. You're still rather muddy from yesterday, and your trip outside didn't help any."

I threw her a thankful smile and busied myself with washing up. The soap was some sort of alien mix that made scrubbing super easy, and I was done before Leah had finished kneading the dirt out of her Overall and washing herself, so I spent the rest of the time waiting for her admiring her beautiful red hair. It had that rich vibrant look you'd usually only see in commercials or expensive ads, not on people. At least, not on people without a lot of money.

"Does your own hair just grow like that?" I asked. "That shade's amazing." It reached like half-way down her back, too, totally with that wavy bounce you'd expect.

"It does, but I'm very sure it's not natural. Lily…she had the exact same hair, and that DNA check showed some patterns that are typical for cosmetic edits. You know, the expensive kind. Made me wonder what happened to my parents. I have no clues as to their identity, or where they are, or where I might have been born. Or why we weren't with them."

"Oh? How expensive are we talking?"

"Hella expensive. CEOs of a middle-sized corpo, or high-level managers of one of the big ones."

"Okay, that's a lot. …Oh."

"Hmm?"

"Figure that had anything to do with your getting kidnapped?"

"Ah…" Her expression was a picture of undecipherable emotions and confused questions, but Ypsi's voice sounded through our skulls:

"That's really unlikely! If your parents had enemies, they would've found you long ago, when you had your DNA tested! And the kidnappers, um, they treated you just like a random unknown Vanguard, not somebody they had a vendetta against. Didn't even comment on your hair! And also, Tinea got kidnapped, too!"

That, I did.

Leah relaxed visibly and sighed, "Yeah. It isn't particularly reasonable to assume a link between my kidnappers and my parents, beyond them probably all being filthy rich. It would've been a hell of a coincidence for me to become a Vanguard just as they prepared to take me."

An even uglier idea sprang to mind, but I killed that one before it could fully form. "There you go. Case closed. Want me to do your hair for you?"

"Nah, I got it. Thanks. Maybe when I don't have a shower installed in my own hand anymore?"

I giggled at her and said, "Sure, sure. Hey, sun's about to come up, in, like, twenty minutes or so. I'd like to get to killing Antithesis again. Also, I have reason to believe there's a nest somewhere nearby…"

"Oh. Um, yeah. Ypsi, how long's the rain going to last?"

The entire morning! Maybe even until after twelve.

"Ah, that's going to be annoying. So, are we still going with ATVs?"

I thought about that a little. It's not like we had points to throw around, and it seemed to me like ATVs were a solid investment. Oh, but could they cross the swamp?

"How large are they?"

"They're just motorbikes, but with four wheels."

Small, then. They'd get stuck…

Unless of course, they were ridden by a pair of samurai.

"Tynea, what's the cheapest addon or whatever, that we can buy to cross the swamp with them?"

I would suggest a Class 0 supersearing foam. If you still intend to get smart turrets for the vehicles, a foam gun could be installed that will spray a rough but usable "bridge" in front of you as you go. The gun would cost twenty points, and one hundred meters' worth of foam two meters wide, twenty five.

"Supersearing foam?"

It's essentially a low-explosive triggered by water, and the byproduct of its detonation forms the bridge. The material instantly hardens and becomes stable enough to support vehicles, and floats on water. One of the more useful exploration tools invented by Earth scientists, designed to allow usually landbound vehicles to engage threats across rivers and lakes. It's a little on the expensive side, though.

That did sound very useful. Still, we'd have to invest about…two hundred points, maybe? If we selected the right spot to ford the swamp.

"And that's cheaper than getting an add-on for the vehicles to, I dunno, skim the water?"

Yes, very likely so. The maps indicate no further need to cross water or swamp, it seems likely that a larger investment would not pay for itself before you outgrew the ATVs.

"I see… Uh, Leah. Are we going to hunt that nest?" That did seem like a mission in itself, and I wasn't sure if Leah was willing to stick around for it.

"I guess?" she said. "Maybe we should locate it, at least. See if it'll mess with our facility-trapping plans."

I nodded. "Tynea? How complicated is that going to get?"

That's difficult to predict. Underground nests are naturally hidden and tend to be fairly dense. They adapt to the lack of space by building fewer, but much stronger units. Above ground, nests usually sprawl which makes detecting them a lot easier, but they'll secret parts of themselves away in crevasses and such, which makes cleanup finicky.

My nails lightly ran over my cheek as I considered the implications of that. More sprawl meant more reach. More reach meant more resources. More resources, more units…more points.

An opportunity. One that we would need a lot of automation to really exploit.

I caught Leah's eye. "If it's above ground, we could use lots of drones to map out Antithesis movements in the area, and locate the nest that way. We'd also get a really good idea how our presence affects them, when and where they'll come from, and how many."

She pursed her lips and said, "That sounds horribly expensive…how many drones would we need?"

Tynea jumped in to answer. The mundane technologies used for such endeavors are usually of the radiological variety mixed with chemical samplers to detect Antithesis pheromones, and heat sensors for temperature differences. We would need only five to ten drones so equipped, but they are expensive and neither of you have the catalogs already unlocked. Esoteric technologies are, of course, better, faster, and even more expensive.

If we instead relied on Tinea's idea of visually tracking and following Antithesis units, we could use inexpensive, stripped-down scout drones, or even cheaper, stripped-down versions of the Light Communications drone. Even if you started with only a few of those, if they were efficiently used to locate Antithesis groups to take down one after the other from your ATVs, your point gain should not only support the purchase of an ever increasing number of new drones, but even outstrip it quite quickly.

Once you have several hundred, you could reliably brute-force the discovery of the nest.

"That does line up nicely," Leah said as I leaned back to properly consider the suggestion.

***