2012.02.20 "It was a silly purpose anyway."

"It was a silly purpose anyway."

I stare into the empty bottom of my drinking crucible, feeling the poisonous elixer of the Volcanic™ burn down my gut and elicit a frantic response from my internal array of nanoscopic robots. It didn't feel like a silly purpose.

"We could head to the Second Galaxy and fight Xoids instead. It could be a challenge, and useful of us...?"

I place my ceramic cup solemnly on the bar, and make a nigh-universal gesture. The bartender approaches with a replacement. "Fighting Xoids is a team sport. Government-scale teams, mainly. And that means joining a suitably-equipped infantry, which means following orders, and I'm not really interested in doing that for fun."

The Orbodun ponders my objection with a slow slurp of beer from his mug.

"Easy on the bar, buddy."

My smallish red eyes alter their squint to glower at the bartender. Then I follow his gaze back down to notice that the augmented talons of my free hand have involuntarily dug runnels in the beverage-support-surface. "Sorry." My voice is a pathetic croak with my quasi-larynx being cramped after so long relying purely on texting.

"Clearly we should do something to relieve tension." The Orbodun is annoyingly sanguine for someone who was nearly killed so recently.

I stare into the obscuring mist pouring out the top of my drink. "It's hard to let go."

"That's exactly the tension you should find a way to rid yourself of."

"It feels kind of like imagining a way to discard most of myself. The vast majority of my experience has been trying to evade and survive those stupid magical robots. I was just a professional weenie when I helped the human female with wings deal with the robots trying to prevent her getting through the trans-reality portal." I pause my text as I shudder from swallowing my replacement Volcanic™.

The Orbodun's mug hovers in front of his snout, temporarily forgotten. "Trans-reality portal?"

"Don't ask; I don't know."

"I assume that the angel-lady told you about it?"

"Bat wings. Armoured. And definitely non-angelic in other ways. Yeah, she mentioned it in brief, mostly focussing on the part about how the robots would be stuck here without her, and that they would hunt me down and try to kill me."

"It seems a bit silly."

"Apparently, it's what they do."

"No, I mean that they should try to stop the bat-girl instead of just getting through the portal themselves."

"They're mentalists, and I guess they knew the portal lead to a trap. Or something. I've imagined a couple workable scenarios, mostly involving the other end of the portal bing places where not having wings was a major tactical problem."

Beer mug re-discovered, the Orbodun takes a long pull. "You've had a long time to think about that, haven't you."

"I'm a seasoned hand-to-hand combatant, and seasoned assassin with faculty applicable to blades, blasters, and rifles, plus a splash of sharpshooter for flavour." Listing it all out like that makes me feel stupid. "It wasn't until I realized that I wasn't worried about a totalitarian planet's security forces inside a prison that maybe I shouldn't be running away any more."

The seasoned Orbodun has a disturbed look about him that I cannot parse. It looks like something died in his beer and he just tasted it. "Just how long have you been evading these robots?"

Hmmm. "Timestamp from meeting Jessica is about 150 megaseconds ago."

The Orbodun blows through pursed lips, possibly expressing significance for the interval.

"Yeah, so: a long time for a combatant."

The Orbodun makes a face.

I scowl at him. I've never spilled my story to anyone before, and I find myself touchy to his reactions. "What?"

"Did you switch between sniper and goon because it would earn skill faster?"

It didn't feel fast. "No. Back near the beginning, I started being too memorable as a talented assassin. Especially as a Massetin. The mind-reading robots were able to sniff me out easier and easier, until they almost had me. So I stopped using the assassination skills unless absolutely necessary, and started working on being a hand-to-hander. Because brawler Massetins fit into a well-worn societal cliché. That actually worked pretty well for a long while."

"What happened?"

I find myself touching a talon to the butt of my filament rifle. "Bad luck."

"So you switched modus operandi again, to become less suspicious. Hence the sharpshooter and the rifle."

"Sort of." Scratch an itch between some spines on my brow ridge. "It was kind of an act of homage, too. The previous owner of this rifle saved me, and died doing so."

A grin on the Orbodun. "You don't strike me as the sentimental sort."

Evil thoughts occur to me regarding striking him. "It's also true that he made it clear to me the tactical value of being able to consistently land hits at long range, instead of necessarily having to wade into close range. You could say it rounded out my arsenal."

"Indeed. And since the Deeply Scary Sorcerer mentalist guy has basically said that the so-called magical robots will now be actively avoiding you because you're too dangerous, you're in a funk because you were hoping to lure them in by being non-sneaky."

I run a tongue over a fang. "You know, when you text it like that, it occurs to me that it might a simple matter of changing my bait..."