Chapter 59: Complication
He sighed and reached across the bench to pinch one of her cheeks. "...thank you for telling me. But no more sparring with anyone until you're cleared for it. Do you understand?"
"Boring man."
He glowered. "If you make it a habit to call me that and take after EIghth Headman, I may have you reassigned to the Seventh."
She shivered. "I'm not good with children."
"That's exactly why I'd do it. It'd keep you safe too away from the walls, so there's a strategic reason behind it."
"That, and being petty?"
"I haven't the smallest iota of sense as to what you're speaking of." He brushed it off and knocked his heel across one of her legs. "Let's discuss something more interesting: You still owe me an explanation for why you wanted to spar."
She scratched at her ear. "It's…complicated."
"We live in a complicated time, doing complicated things, discussing complicated topics, and contemplating our complicated future. I fail to see why that should be a cause for hesitation."
"You promise you won't tell my medical staff I've cracked?"
"To survive in our day and age, we all need to act a little insane," he reassured her, though his thoughts hardly matched. He could conjure a grand number of motives for her subterfuge, but few sat well with him as things currently stood, and fewer still were permissible according to military standards. "And after what you've experienced, it would be abnormal for you not to be, at least somewhat. Would it help if I shared something first?"
"No, no, I'll say it." She turned to look at him. He felt obligated to clasp one of her hands, finding the touch of cold metal alerting him of his random choice. "I saw a person fighting an Aud out there."
"I take it you aren't meaning someone in a WAV." That wouldn't be worth much consideration and the mood she was under.
"Whoever they were, they fought a purple Aud." He sat up straighter, his attention on her words and nothing else. "And they drove it off. I think they pursued it when I last saw them."
"Tell me everything." His eyes gleamed, as his mind whirled with activity and gears motorizing themselves into action with results ready to pour from his tongue. She began from the point when she had to make a detour into one of the lesser tunnels. He listened with rapt focus, eyes flicking to the floor and ceiling on occasion. When she concluded her account, he nodded. "Why wasn't this included in your official account?"
"Because I thought it was a hallucination." At his prodding, she elaborated. "All those cocktails mixing; one of the simplest side effects I expected from the start: imagined stimuli. It made sense too. What human could go toe-to-toe with an Aud and live outside of a WAV, even if they're one of the blessed?"
"But you don't anymore, do you?"
She waved her hands in a vague motion. Was it dismissal or an expression of excuse? "For a few days, I managed to convince myself that was all it was. Chemical misfires in my brain sending the wrong signals to the wrong receptors." Her fingers went to tracing the stripe on the replacement arm.
"But then I remembered my WAV suffered light gashes in the rear. The only time that side suffered duress that I can note, was when I fell. That would cause indentations from loose rock and a flattening, caking effect on those rear plates. But not horizontal tears like that. And my WAV detected it as well with a fur scanner; that came too once I thought on it further."
They fell silent, and he was grateful for the reprieve so that he could manage the new additions to his understanding of the situation. Pa-5 mentioned one characteristic: large, angry, yellow eyes that burned in the darkness. She remembered more; he knew she did when she began stuttering.
She tried to speak, but a look of confusion came over her face. He'd asked her, "Is something wrong?" and received the reply he'd expected: "I…forgot what I was thinking about." It was one he'd only heard a few times, but each time he did, it sounded something like that.
The speaker "forgot" it. More specific than that, they forgot they were discussing the figure with yellow, burning eyes when they were about to list further identifying characteristics: blades where hands should've been, and full-body clothing covering every centimeter of skin.
How did he know this? It was one of the safeguards Tool had in place to obscure knowledge of its presence; he'd experienced it himself when experimenting.
That, and the mention of its eyes, confirmed the figure that drove off the purple Aud was none other than the ephemeral Tool.
Recalling the mangled state of Tool's weaponry when he'd last seen it, he tossed that in as further proof. Pa-5 looked like she wanted to voice a thought, but he raised a finger to her lips. Head lowered as it was, he didn't see the way her eyes rounded upon him at considerable loss for her circumstance at his hands.
What was Tool doing near Pa-5? Not to say he wasn't grateful for its intervention, but from what limited expertise on the matter he could access, that wasn't the way it operated. Tool, like him--or should he say he, like Tool?--was concerned with the larger picture and how small alterations in time would produce drastic changes down the line.
He pinched the bridge of his nose a second time. Alright, so they weren't so alike. His thought process remained limited to a single instance of time.
Were specific points in time called instances? Or something else? But the fact remained that Tool had gone against the precedent of its previous actions in saving Pa-5's life.
Was its presence there a simple cause of coincidence? Was the purple-fur targeting Pa-5 in its path? Or something more specific, but less direct? He could see it targeting that specific Aud, but for what purpose? Why? There was a final option, but it made too little sense for him to consider it as if it held genuine contention.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone