Chapter Text
“Doesn’t she look better with a bow, though?” Cyn swoops back around and lands softly on Uzi’s head, “I wish I could wear a bow.” The three of them are standing in the hallway at school. Fluorescent lights flicker overhead as students can be heard chittering in the background.
Uzi bats Cyn away as she yanks the bow from her hair and chucks it at Braiden, “Ugh ew, stop it! I’m too edgy for that!” Uzi grabs her books and slams her locker shut as N chuckles.
“I’m not sure, it’s kind of nice! Black really suits you!”
Uzi grimaces and blushes, “Ew I hate that you said that, shut up.”
As the two walk side-by-side towards their next class, N nudges Uzi, “You know, I’ve been thinking. What if I downgraded to the height of a worker drone?”
“Wait- what?”
N gestures to his arms and legs, “I really don’t need chainsaws and machine guns for hands if we’re no longer building spires, knocking heads off and stuff… It’ll make it easier for me to fit in with my classmates. Plus, none of the furniture’s made for ‘Disassembly Drone’ height.”
Tail-Cyn swings back around and lands on N’s hat as she remarks, “Uzi likes you because you’re tall. You are only loved for your height.”
“Wait what?”
“N-No! Shut up, Liar!” Uzi yanks Cyn back, “stop traumatizing him already!” As she reassures N, “Would you, you know, be able to uh…shrink?”
He glares up at the ceiling as he scratches at the back of his head, “You know, my reboot program may not allow that to happen? But, eh, it’s just a thought!” N smiles as he taps his headband and catches his syringe, “Not sure what I’d do with these though.”
As they reach their next class, Uzi gives him a smile, “I’d love you no matter what.”
…
Elsewhere, Jay and Vee are combing through debris and bodies outside of the colony. They’ve pledged some degree of ‘no-kill’ within this particular colony and continue to look for resources and oil outside.
“Scavenging like vultures,” Jay rolls her eyes as she plucks a dry arm from the pile and flings it behind her, “Where’s my year end bonus?”
“You’re not the one who saved the world, so why’re you complaining?” Vee flies up a bit higher on the spire and pulls a head off a dead drone body. “Think we already checked this pile?”
Jay’s eyes catch on something that holds her attention for longer than usual, but before she can investigate, she pulls herself back to Vee. “Let’s go check west of here,” she shrugs, “we’ve got to find something to eat.” Her eyes return to the ground, a half-buried suit and tie and an all-too-familiar logo for JCJenson In Spaaace can be seen, half covered by snow. Jay shuts her eyes as she pulls her wings out and takes off, heading west.
The two former murder drones land in the open area of a building destroyed by ice and time. The crumbling concrete and broken rebar of the exposed interior floors make decent landing shelves. The girls peer around, walking through the ruins, searching for any remains they haven’t yet consumed.
“Where is the bolt-brain anyway?” Jay sighs as she flashes her light around the rooms and halls, “Nit-wit no longer joins us for patrols.”
Vee tears a metal sheet from the wall as she discovers where someone’s been camping out. “N and Uzi have been hanging out every day for months now. You would’ve known that if you…I don’t know…didn’t betray us for months on end?”
“Ugh!” Jay scoffs, “You want to talk about betrayal!?”
Vee is caught off guard as she glares into the wall to see a game of ‘Tetris’ abruptly end as a pair of glowing teal eyes appear, “H-hi Vee!” the voice whimpers.
Standing up Vee lets out an annoyed sigh, “Get out of the wall, Braiden! Go home! We almost killed you, idiot!”
The found worker drone clambors out from the wall before scurrying back towards the colony, he lets out a warbled “Th-thank you!” as he vanishes from their sights.
“See, you didn’t kill him and I didn’t kill him!” Jay shrugs. She smiles as she places her hands on her hips, “Therapy’s working and I’m growing as a person!”
Vee nods to her, “Well, we shouldn’t eat our classmates anymore… Technically the no-kill agreement is meant for drones inside the colony.”
“Now you say that!?” Jay hucks a ‘Best Boss’ ceramic mug at Vee, and Vee’s laughter can be heard echoing through the halls.
…
Back at the Doorman residence, Khan is welding together an arm to a shoulder joint. Over the years, the emergency room within the colony has produced enough spare parts for the growing and aging drone population. Normally this sort of endeavor is undertaken by a trained technician, as a lot can go wrong with drone manufacturing. But with Nori’s help and a couple ‘borrowed’ manuals, the pair have been so far successful in the creation of a new drone body for Nori.
Although having a new body would be nice, the main purpose of this is not solely just for her benefit. As the welding TIG cools off, Khan removes the protective shield from his face and Nori crawls out from behind hers. He raises an eyebrow to her “Do you think this’ll work?”
“It has to,” she sighs, “I’ve spent years looking for the patch, and it was found and destroyed in a day.” She traces a claw along the metallic arm of the half-constructed body and glances at the absent head, “I could’ve been- Uzi can be- I just- I’m the cause of everything wrong in her life.”
Khan reaches over and picks up his wife’s heartbeat, “No you’re not, you’re her mother.” He holds her tight, “Technically, we’re the cause of all her problems. But besides that, we’ll make you whole again and we’ll remake the patch.” He holds her in his hands, “The solver won’t have control over any of you. We can fix this.”
“Sh-shut up, don’t look at me like that,” she looks away, blush lines reflecting in the bottom of her display, “But yeah, we can fix this.”
He leans over and gives his wife a peck on the top of her crab-heart head. “You know, twenty years flew by; and an untrained neural network’s no longer an arm and a leg.”
Nori rolls her eyes, “Let’s finish my body and get the patch sorted out first, then we can talk about shelling out limbs for another kid. No solver powers this time!” She hops from his hands back onto the table in place of where the head should be, “God, I hope this works.”
The two are quickly interrupted as the door to the apartment slams open. “UGH! Just shut up already!”
“Did you know that the first song to be sung by a computer was originally a-” Cyn’s jilted voice is suddenly muffled as Uzi hisses.
“Sing that song one more time and I will bite you.”
Khan quickly pulls a sheet over the half reconstructed worker drone body. He stands by the table as Nori crawls up onto his shoulder, “Hey there kiddo!” he chuckles, “How was school?”
Uzi slams the door to her room behind her as she shouts, “Bite me!”
“...Actually, I don’t know if I want to do this for another 22 years, babe,” Nori sighs as she pats her husband’s shoulder with a claw, “Let’s pin that conversation for now, m’kay? Good talk.”
…
An hour or so passes as Lizzy meets up with Vee for their pre-planned girls hangout. Vee invited Jay, but the two aren’t exactly on speaking terms, on account of what happened earlier.
The two girls are chilling in Lizzy’s room. Vee’s chilling on Lizzy’s bed while Lizzy sits next to her. Lizzy can’t help but stare between her phone screen and at Vee. It’s not that she’s jealous of Vee, and it’s not that she’s lonely. But between staring at her phone screen or staring at Vee, she can’t help but feel guilty for doing either, or both.
A small loading symbol flashes on Lizzy’s display as she turns towards Vee. The disassembly drone is preoccupied with a book that she’s reading. Vee glances at Lizzy before removing her glasses and closing the book, “What do you want, loser?” She smiles.
“Ugh nothing,” Lizzy crosses her arms and averts her gaze, but she can’t help but glance over and ask, “So uh-” she gestures to Vee’s headband and syringe, “-Does that like, hurt? Or anything?”
Vee grins to both ends of her display, her head tilts slightly as she seethes, “Wanna find out?”
Clamping her mouth shut, Lizzy slowly turns her face back down. Her display reflected on her phone screen, shocked eyes and blush lines.
Vee scoffs, “Geez chill, I’m just kidding. N, Jay and I signed some stupid piece of paper that says we can’t kill you freaks.” Vee jumps up from Lizzy’s bed and shrugs, “Other colonies are still fair game.” As she receives a message on her phone, she checks the notification.
Lizzy glances up from her spot on the edge of her bed, her mind racing as she can’t get herself to speak.
“Ugh, I gotta split,” Vee’s shoulders slack as she turns on her heel to give Lizzy a lazy salute, “tall and hot drones only, wouldn’t want you to end up torn to pieces, right?” Vee winks at Lizzy before heading out.
Now alone, Lizzy’s mouth finally opens as she whispers ‘bye’ to her friend. As she pulls herself off of her bed, Lizzy walks to the door and hesitates as she switches her message recipient from Vee to Thad.
‘Hey,’ she writes to him, ‘my bestie ditched me to get dinner with her other friends. Want to hang out?’
After a moment on ‘Read’ the pending message ellipses vanish as Thad sends his reply, ‘Aight, come check out my new project! Classroom B7.’
Reluctantly, Lizzy pulls on her coat and heads out to the school sector of the colony. The halls are actually dark and terribly long at night. Perhaps when alone, she doesn’t have to put up a front. The cool, popular girl, bored and ‘so done’ with everyone’s crap can finally chill. Not like it matters, she thinks to herself, would anyone care if I was gone? Is Vee even my friend? Thad is, I think… She checks her phone, no new messages. She wonders why she puts so much emphasis on how others see her. And to play it all off as uncaring as she does, it’s not effortless, it’s exhausting. I don’t get it… Uzi Freak-show Doorman has two of the hottest drones worshiping her every step, yet I can’t even get Vee to like- talk to me- without vaguely threatening to murder me… Lizzy clicks her phone off and shoves it in her pocket as she rounds the corner and enters the school sector.
As Lizzy approaches the door to Classroom B7 she pauses, checks herself out in her phone’s front-facing camera, and shakes off the broody-teen side of her that she occasionally indulges in. Once the mask is back in place, she scoffs and drops her shoulders for good measure, still got it. Flipping her hair back she flings open the door and turns the light on in the darkened classroom.
She grimaces, “Ew,” flicking her wrist at Thad she snarks, “what the heck are you even doing? You look like a loser, sitting in the dark by yourself like this.”
Thad waves her over, he’s hard at work writing some sort of code on a computer, “You know how Uzi hacks into other’s heads sometimes? Well, I nabbed one of her disc thingies last month, and I’ve been trying to see how it works. And I think I’ve started to hack the hack heheh!”
Lizzy rolls her eyes, “And? Is that supposed to be impressive or something?”
Thad holds the white and red disc between his fingers and shakes it towards Lizzy’s head, “Want me to hack you?”
She bats away his hand, “Ew, get that loser crap away from me.”
“Suit yourself,” he shrugs and pops the node on his temple, “Check out all the cool stuff I can do!” He clicks a few buttons and sits back, “I’m downloading the answers to Mr. Vicker’s next exam!”
Lizzy’s mind is elsewhere as her eyes trail around the empty classroom and stop by the door. “Like… why can’t I- just- be myself… around Vee?”
Thad pulls the node off his head and turns towards her.
She shrugs as her voice echoes slightly, “We hang out and stuff… ‘Girl Besties.’ But,” she walks past Thad, her eyes tracing the walls and door to the hall. “I don’t know… Vee’s just-” she exhales, “-She’s out of reach, Thad.”
“I don’t get it,” he stands and reaches an arm towards her, “you already seem like yourself around Vee?” He pauses and tries to encourage her to elaborate, "So…”
“I’m not- you- Ugh!” she slaps her hands against her sides, “It’s so like you to not know anything about girls! It’s like…a thing?”
Thad shrugs, “Direct communication and honesty’s a thing. Have you tried that?”
Blush lines cover the bottom of Lizzy’s display as she crosses her arm over her chest and holds onto the other. “What if she doesn’t want to be my friend anymore?”
Thad lightly punches her shoulder, “You’re a cool dude, I’m sure she’d appreciate you, all of you.” When his words don’t change her mood, his expression slowly shifts from one of friendly encouragement to one of curious concern, “Like, are you worried she’d hurt you? Or-?”
Lizzy just looks down and zips up her coat to the collar, “I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel. She makes me…happy? I’m just happy to be around her, even when she threatens me, I’m just happy she’s there. I just wish I knew how to act around her. It’s weird.”
“Yeah, that is a bit weird,” he shrugs.
She jerks around, “Sh-shut up! I’m the only one who can say it’s weird!”
…
For the last three hours, Jay has been searching outside the colony for food. Earlier she and Vee let one lone worker escape just because he knew who they were. Not like he’d be missed. We should’ve popped his little head off when we had the opportunity.
She stands along the steep slope of another spire of bodies. Her metallic wings outstretched, gray hair blowing in the wind of the snowstorm. The cold air is nice, but at some point they need to eat something. All the discarded shrapnel and drones at her feet have been bled dry of oil.
With a sharp beat of her wings, she’s up and flying through the night sky. A loop and a dive then she’s half a mile away, landing on the ground within a plume of powder snow. It settles slowly, as she dusts the snow off her coat.
She resumes her search in another pile of discarded drone bodies. As she walks along, a familiar drone frame catches her eyes. She glances over to see a predecessor of hers. A defunct copy of a Jay disassembly drone, half buried in the snow, the other half burnt and in pieces. She stoops down to see where her heartbeat would’ve evacuated, a dismantled chest cavity with claw marks ripping open the silver polymer skin casing.
Jay looks from her own hands to the body on the ground and cannot quite recall how long ago it was inhabited.
We all share the same core memories. She nudges the torso with the end of her leg, but it’s been out here so long, it’s completely wedged under ice. The copy’s clothes match hers perfectly, save for the wear and tear the other’s endured.
She thinks about how the original Jay was built to be a corporate assistant. Original Jay was built for JCJenson in Spaaaace. She worked as a higher level assistant for years, before she was marked for disposal and shut down.
Tessa, the real Tessa, scavenged through the disposal yard, and plucked parts and mostly intact drones for her home. That’s where she found me.
“N-Not me,” Jay whispers to herself in the dark. They’re not my memories but, I like to think they belong to…a part of me. Jay squeezes her eyes shut and walks on, past her predecessor’s remains.
Her fingers curl into fists as small curved lines clutter her display. Stretching out her wings, Jay takes off back into the sky, running from the body, running from herself. Her mind races and worried lines crease her display before a sudden flash of the ‘High Temp’ warning clouds her vision.
Maybe not a wind current, likely just a miscalculation on her part; Jay falters and falls back towards the ground, crashing into a mound of pieces. But when she regains the ability to see herself among the snow and smoke, she sees what she’s been searching for, oil.
It’s covered her hands and arms, dripping from somewhere, and for the moment she doesn’t care if it’s someone else's oil or her own. She’s starving, overheating, and it’s something.
For a ravaged second she loses her composure, and she consumes until she receives a red flashing error message.
Warning! Inflicting Self-Damage: Absolute_Solver_Override Engaged.
Her head is yanked back away from her arms as the Absolute Solver program repairs her gashes with materials drawn from the bodies around her. Once the override disengages, she is left again to herself.
For a moment, Jay sees her face in the darkened display visor of a drone head. Her wide grin and crossed out display, splattered black and disheveled, I look horrible, she thinks to herself.
Looking at her hands, claws now protrude where her fingers should be. She’s disgusted. The smile vanishes from her face shortly before her eyes return to her display.
All my past lives, however many I’ve gone through, we’ve all had to perform, obey… For what?
“All my ‘accomplishments,’ if I’ve ever really had any, have only led up to… this?” She flexes her hand as the claws fold away and replace themselves with her regular finger joints.
“Jay!” She recognizes the holler from Vee and quickly pulls herself together, wiping the oil from her face before taking off towards the sound of her voice.
With another plume of powdered snow kicked up by the landing, Jay joins Vee, N and Uzi as the four drones unite outside of the colony.
Jay’s hands perch on her hips as she nods at N and Uzi, “Why is little miss corporate drone in today’s meeting?”
“Calling me a corporate drone is absolutely rich coming from you,” Uzi shrugs in a sudden moment of embarrassment, “I had to leave. I was… um…”
“She’s hungry,” N states as he crosses his arms across his chest, “Like the rest of us. And yeah, we don’t really want her eating her folks, so…”
Jay chuckles to herself, “accidentally eating your loved ones is a right of passage, right Vee?”
Vee grimaces before she reaches into her pocket and pulls out her glasses. She places them on her face before walking to Jay, where’s that hologram you can make? The map for the area?”
“Tch, ugh,” After rolling her eyes, Jay switches her hand to the projector setting before generating the topographical hologram land map.
Holding her chin, Vee reads the map and moves it around, “So we found nothing here, and nothing here. Did we check south of the spire?”
As the two girls talk through their previous location results, N turns to Uzi. “You good?”
She brushes her hair away from the front of her display as she considers something horrible. Colony 949 is twenty miles east of here. It’s the closest colony. Do they know about it? Is it already empty? She glances up at N, “N- there’s another-”
“Yo- nerds! We’ve got something promising,” Vee taunts as she hovers in the air, wings glimmering against the sky, “let’s move it!” Her wings snap and she’s gone, dust and snow in her wake.
Uzi looks up to see N’s outstretched hand, “You ready?”
A slight smile creeps across her face before the two of them are up, soaring through the night, hot on the tails of Jay and Vee.
The four drones land miles and miles away from the colony. The dive was sudden, and from the sky Uzi could see what looked like a fire burning near a treeline. They were far enough away from Uzi’s home, but still nowhere near colony 949.
Uzi lands in a clear area, sparsely populated with trees, rocks and brush. She glances over towards an embankment and sees smoke rising from over the hill, down in the valley below. She feels a hand on her shoulder. Wincing around she sees it’s N. “Uh, Uzi… You should stay over here for a while,” he smiles, “Okay?”
“Wh- what? Why?” She shrugs, as her voice picks up, “Y-you said I could be involved-”
He holds the side of his head, instability rising as his eyes flicker and twitch, “It’s safer if you stay out of this.”
“N!” Vee’s voice snarls from the side, “We’ve got a couple campers!” Her eyes were replaced by a glaring X on her display. Her metallic wings and claws became fully extended.
Uzi staggers backwards, surely capable of handling herself with the disassembly drones, but it might’ve been best to let them explore the area first. A misstep causes her to stumble back on herself as she lands in the snow. N glares down at her, his display now a glowing cross. His hands fold in as claws protrude in their place. As he turns towards Uzi she shouts, “Uh- Hello? Don’t eat me! Go that way, you idiot!”
Jay’s previous taunt echoes in Uzi’s mind as she resolves to not be eaten. She reaches to her side and picks up a branch, as she lunges up, she smacks N across the face with it, knocking him out of his crazed state.
“Ack! Geez- Ok, sorry, stay put, I’ll be back!” He clicks his tongue and points both hands at her before flying off in the direction of the screams.
Uzi takes a few unsteady steps backwards before falling back into the snow. The ‘High Temp’ warning peaks with her stressed state. She’s desperate, and the screams and shots nearby feel like they’re coming from inside her head. Picking up handfuls of snow, she presses them to her face to cool down, ignoring the likelihood of creating a short-circuit and the quick to appear ‘internal moisture detected’ warning as the snow steams.
And all the while Cyn is singing, almost happy to see her work taken form again and again. “Daisy Doorman, give me your answer, doo! You’re half crazy, but I will still love you~”
Uzi becomes over-anxious and over-exerted; she loses control and the solver virus piques and takes over. The purple cross covers Uzi’s display as she lashes out on the Cyn-biotic parasite. Pulling the head of the creature toward her, she bites down on the pest’s neck before wincing back in pain.
“‘Bite Me’” Cyn mocks, “You love saying that so much. I didn’t think that biting yourself would bother you.” The head of the creature tilts as its eye glows bright yellow, “You’re cute when you’re angry. But you’re still stupid.”
“Uzi!” She’s pulled from her dazed state as N flies over towards her, landing just shy of crashing into her. As the snow clears N’s outstretched hand is within her reach, “We uh…” N pulls her to her feet before he rubs the back of his head, “We have… We’re sharing?” he awkwardly grins with a shrug, “If uh…that’s not too gross for you?”
Cyn wraps around Uzi and rests on her head, “She is disgusted by you freaks. She plans to betray you al-”
Uzi clamps her hands around the parasite’s mouth as she nods to N, “I appreciate it, thanks…”
N and Uzi head towards the others, just around an embankment, down a snow covered hill. Nestled at the bottom was a small make-shift camp where a couple worker drones had set up for the night. A roaring fire still aglow with toasted batteries long burnt still stuck in the fire. Tents long destroyed by shots fired and razor sharp claws. Oil splattered against the snow.
“So, Uzi, we’ve got one in the tent, and another by the trees,” Vee smiles as she picks at her teeth, “Ah that was perfect! Does anyone else feel like camping out here for the night? So cozy!”
Uzi slowly turns her head towards N, small lines under her eyes. N places a hand on her head and looks down at her, “You good, Uzi?”
“You won’t last long if you’re this squeamish every time you need to eat,” Jay hands Uzi an arm. “Get over it or overheat to death.”
Uzi’s display flickers to creased eyes and a contorted frown, “It doesn’t bother you? Did it ever?” It’s unclear who she’s talking to, she just asks.
“At one point yeah. But you uh… get used to it,” N shrugs, “S-sorry.”
“It wasn’t always like this,” Vee chimes in from afar, “but you already knew that.”
Uzi pulls her backpack off and takes the arm, shoving it in her bag as she explores the rest of the camp. The gruesome scene pulls up mental images of her time at camp 98.7; images of Darren and Rebecca’s mangled remains.
As she looks around the remains of the tent, Uzi finds a key card for what she can only assume to be doors to a colony. The numbers 949 are written in red ink. This could get us into another colony… Her mind immediately jumping to sacrificing her own kind for the disassembly drones has her feeling horrified but intrigued. Her eyes widen as she can’t help but grin; the wicked satisfaction abruptly replaced by a sense of disgust and disappointment in herself. What the hell am I thinking? W-what’s wrong with me? Yet even though she’s morally torn, Uzi continues pocketing the key card, her eyes shift to the oily pieces of shrapnel in the tent. The oil glistening in the firelight sends a wave of panic through her as the ‘High Temp’ warning blinks on her display- everything suddenly goes black.
…
A little while later, back in the colony at the Doorman’s residence, Khan is flipping an instruction manual upside down to try to better understand what he’s reading. “Uh…Nori?” he sighs with the manual in his hands as he sits back down on a dining room chair, “Maybe we should tell Uzi, and see if she can help us?”
Nori crawls over the body, careful not to pull out the cords and cables spilling from the exposed chest cavity. “Just because she’s good at hacking doesn’t mean she needs to do this. If it’s stressful for us to reconstruct a body, it’ll be more so for her.”
Khan shrugs, “Don’t underestimate her, she hacked a couple murder drones for fun a few months ago,” he flips the manual right-side up and squints at the paragraphs, “I’m sure she’d easily be able to ‘connect the neural sensors with the inter-caviti-vicular-cables with the central neural-transmitter.’ Who the heck wrote this? This is gibberish!”
“She does like her si-fi nonsense,” Nori’s heart plucks at a stray cable that’s connected externally to a hand and finger joints, “I think this is supposed to be inside the body?”
Khan snaps the manual shut, “Curse my limited mechanical knowledge only pertaining to doors!”
The front door to the apartment creaks open as Uzi stumbles inside.
Khan and Nori exchange uncertain glares as the two meet their daughter in the apartment hallway, “Uzi! H-how was your day?”
She’s exhausted and smells like smoke and soot. Her display is at half-brightness and only showing partially-open eyes.
“Get some rest, Uzi,” Nori remarks, “We’re happy you’re home.”
Their daughter disappears into her room, leaving the door half-open.
Returning to the disassembled drone body in the dining room, Nori and Khan consider their options. “I could ask one of Uzi’s friends?” Khan offers.
“Really?” Nori glares, “I guess it’s a start. I don’t know. We need to find my head.” She slinks over the body and perches where the head would go, “the original patch was used on me, so there’s a chance that the code is still intact. Might make it easier to retrieve the code that way?” She taps the top of her heart head with a claw, “Not sure if that info’s stored in me like this though.”
Khan plays with the end of his mustache as he traces a finger along the back of the mis-constructed hand. “If we need your head, we’re gonna need some help finding it, sweetie.” He shrugs with one hand as he looks at his wife, “Have you seen the outside?”
“Yes moron, I lived out there for years.”
Unbeknownst to the Doormans, Cyn-tail has snuck out from within Uzi’s room and slithers down the hall towards the parents. She eavesdrops, laying in wait with a sly grin on her face.
“Once you recreate the patch, will you just use it on you and Uzi?”
After a moment’s pause, Nori replies, “There’s only a handful of solver users that I know of, those murder drones have something else in their systems. If the patch ends up being a universal fix, I don’t see why I wouldn’t use it on them too.”
“You’d save the monsters who killed you?” His voice is incredulous.
Nori stammers, “W-what? I don’t want them to make another spire! Besides, if Uzi and N wind up staying together,” her voice lowers back to a whisper, “you want to run the risk of that bozo killing her too?”
Khan concedes, “Fair enough, you’re right.”
“If they can’t be killed, curing them should be the next logical step. Even if the humans royally screwed up, it’s not like the world can get much worse, right Khan?”
Cyn-tail quietly giggles to herself as she whispers, “wanna bet?”