[I]I wonder how they work,[/I] she thought, cocking her head to the left as she watched the distant fireworks over the treetops, hearing the bone-rattling booms that would definitely be deafening up close as the odd extremities she could see over there, reaching above the trees like fallen giants reaching for the sky. Those were obviously guns of some kind - [I]big[/I] guns - but of a sort she had never had the chance to examine before, or seen before, even. There were also airplanes of some kind, though it seemed they were being chased off by some kind of beam weaponry from the ground. She could not see the weapons that discharged these rays of destructive energy, which bothered her, but she did not dare move any closer than this. Though her view of what was happening was far from the best - she was maybe a dozen kilometers from the battlefield, and already had to zoom a lot in the image to tell what was happening, to such an extent that the image grew pixilated and difficult to see details on - it was as good as she would let it be.
	These other factions were really dangerous; she knew this before as well, of course, but this was her first time actually witnessing the work of more warlike factions as they had unfolded. She had visited battlefields before, but only once things had calmed down and the areas were left abandoned. Her own faction had never really done any fighting, aside from scaring away some animals now and then, or fending off someone who thought they would steal from them or sabotage their work somehow.
	They were not soldiers, nor were they thieves; her faction were scavengers. Whenever something like this happened nearby, they would wait a fair amount of time - several days, at least - to give the people fighting a fair chance at recovering anything they had left there, before they went to pick through the remains. Sometimes they found little besides scrap, which was useful in and by itself, but the really exciting stuff was when there were little bits of technology left behind. A blown-up vehicle, a broken gun, a smashed helmet full of little gismos inside; all kinds of fun stuff could be found on even old battlefields, though nothing beat finding abandoned ruins or the like, where treasure awaited to be claimed by whoever found them first.
	Intriguing though technology could be, however, it seemed as though battle itself was pretty boring... at least from this distance. Maybe something more interesting was happening on the ground, but from here it just looked like weird little towers expulsing tracer rounds and sending them skyward, and flashing beams keeping airplanes that looked the size of insects at a distance.

	Deciding that there was nothing to be learned from observing the battle from this far away after all, she bent her left little finger inwards, manipulating the mechanical glove on her hand to make the device zoom back out until the battle was little more than distant flashes across a sea of trees a couple of plates over. The first bit of zooming was purely digital  and silent, and just served to remove the pixilation until the image improved to the point where it was immediately indistinguishable from what a human eye would see, and then was accompanied by a quiet buzzing noise as the mechanical zoom took over.
	She moved her thumb in a sort of counterclockwise circular motion, and the view of the camera panned to the left; when she bent her ring finger inward, the camera panned down until it was looking at herself, sitting cross legged on top of her black-and-green little cart. She could visually confirm herself smiling at the sight of herself sitting there, eyes closed and left hand held up in front of her chest, looking almost as though she was just meditating.
	Manipulating the mechanical glove on her left hand some more the drone flew back down to her, and the subtle whirring of its small rotors became audible to her ears in addition to the microphone in the drone. It was still a fairly novel experience, existing outside of her body at the same time as inside of it like this; being able to see herself as though she was someone else. Brown boots the design of which had probably come from a military of some kind, good for rough terrain, warm and waterproof; grey trousers the legs of which were in two layers, each layer capable of being detached and removed on its own just above the knee, rendering them into a pair of lighter trousers or shorts as befit the temperature; a light, black jacket lined with more pockets than she knew what to do with, wind- and waterproof and with a matching hood. She wore a holster under her left breast, secured by two straps - one around her waist, the other diagonally over her ribcage and shoulder - containing an unusually large handgun of sorts. A unique specimen, that one; she knew, because she had built it herself.
	Her face was a little on the round side, with faintly pronounced cheekbones, a little button nose and a bit of an overbite. She had thought herself pretty cute, once, before her accident... but now that the upper right side of her skull was occupied by a dark-grey device - about five centimeters tall and ten centimeters wide, and stuck out some three centimeters or so from her skin, placed just at the edge of her right cheekbone - surrounded by gnarly scars, which extended even onto the rightmost part of her right eyelid and eye socket, it was hard to think about herself that way. She found her current state interesting, to be sure, and she was deeply fascinated with the things it allowed her to do and the possibilities it had opened up for her, but she could never bring herself to be completely happy with what had happened. She had tried to comb her brown hair over the device for a while, making sure to grow it long enough to do so, but ultimately she just gave up and accepted her current state. Maybe some part of her used it as an excuse to leave when she did, but it had never been a factor that had had an effect on the conscious decision to leave her faction behind.
	Opening her left eye, she both confirmed through the drone that she did indeed still have shockingly blue eyes, and let her real eye look back at the drone, watching the little matte-grey spherical construct hovering in front of her by the power of three rotors. Smile widening, she reached her right hand out and picked the little robot out of the air - it was just around eight centimeters in diameter - and allowed her to turn off the rotors. She left the audio-video feed on for a little longer, though, bracing herself as she opened her right eye.
	The experience was, as it had always been, oddly disorienting and left her feeling dizzier and dizzier the longer she let it continue. Her right eye looked at the drone, and the drone looked back at her right eye, telling her that while it did indeed look somewhat normal in shape, it was still a bit off. The white of that eye did not have any visible veins nor reddish areas, but was a much too pure white color, and the iris had an obviously artificial clean and regular pattern in it, in addition to being metallic grey instead of blue.
	Her having a cybernetic eye was not what affected her so in itself, though; rather, she suspected that it was a matter of her technically receiving visual input from her right eye twice, and her brain having trouble coping with that. The eye was connected to her through the same interface as the drone, after all, so right now she was getting two interfering images and could not properly deal with it.

	She turned off the drone completely with a little wince, opened a side-compartment of her cart - it was the shape of a long box with six wheels on the bottom and a handle at the back end top, about a meter tall and wide, and one and a half meter long - and put the drone in its charging station in there.
	The plates on top of the cart had the dark side turned outwards at the moment, since not only was it night, but she did not want the solar panels on the other side to accidentally reflect something that could alert the distant warriors to her presence... which was obviously a ludicrous thought. She was far away, so there was no way anyone over there would see her, and even if they did, she was of no consequence to them. She was no soldier, she was just an engineer out seeing what amazing wonders this planet had in store for her, what new devices she could find, take apart and either restore to working condition or make new things out of. There seemed to be plenty of interesting stuff over there, but it would be a few days before she would be even remotely comfortable picking through the leftovers over there. It was fairly likely that there would be nothing but scrap left, but you never knew when a treasure was going to show itself.

	She had been almost due south from where those giant war-machines had been firing, and considering how undesirable it would be for those big, powerful factions to notice her moving around, she figured that she had better not get any closer, at least. She sort of wanted to head west, to where she knew there were some old ruins she had not explored yet, but she also knew that since her faction had known about that place for a while, and with it being so close to them, there was no way that there was anything interesting left over there. Going even further west meant getting close to another faction’s territory, too, and one that she had been warned against going anywhere near many times in the past to boot. Odd thing, too, since no one else seemed quite as scared of the place when they were not talking to her. They kept telling her to stay away from there because they had “thinking machines” that could get inside her head because of the interface in her skull. They sounded really interesting over there, and she would love to learn more about these machines, but she was curious, not stupid; west was not an option.
	South seemed like the obvious choice - away from the battle, into the safety of the forest - but it was boring. Her people had meticulously recovered everything worth anything in that entire area, as far as she knew, and she did not want to return home empty-handed once her trip was over. Southeast would take her back home, or at least closer to it, so that was out of the question...
	By the process of elimination, then, she reached the decision to head east. That area was scarier, since other factions occasionally fought this far north - as they were doing a bit further north just now - and not nearly as thoroughly explored. She might find some goodies yet... though it was better to wait until sunrise, at least, so she could use the solar panels on her cart. It had batteries, but she did not want to drain them unless she had the ability to recharge them easily afterwards, so that she did not end up stuck with the heavy thing all of a sudden, with no power for the engine that helped her push it around. She would just head east a little, then settle down for the night.

	She had barely gotten moving the next morning when she heard a gunshot, followed by some spotter-birds giving someone - likely the shooter - a hearty reprimand not too far away, and immediately stopped dead in her tracks, staring in the direction of the sound. Her immediate thought was that she had better run away - there had been a major battle just hours ago, after all, and she had no way of knowing if the fighting was still going on or if the battlefield had moved during the night - but the more she thought about it, the less anxious and more curious she grew. If it had been soldiers fighting each other, there was really no way she would have heard just one shot; there would have been follow-up shots, returned fire, and all those vaguely familiar noises that came with fighting using guns. Even it just being two straggling soldiers from last night that strayed close to each other, one shooting the other, seemed unlikely; if someone had actually died or gotten hurt, she did not think the spotter-birds would have dared to speak out against the ones disturbing the peace. It was a lone shooter who had shot at something, but without hitting the target or the target counterattacking, and who did not feel it necessary to fire a second shot despite missing. She did not exactly know what to make of that, and not knowing made her curious.
	The spotter-birds were not actually scolding the shooter, of course, as much as they were warning others of something dangerous and trying to call nearby predators - such as humans - to eliminate it. She was quite familiar with them, and knew better than to get on their bad side. They were awfully smart, those birds... and as long as one stayed on good terms with them, they did not get in one’s way.
	The shooter must have really antagonized them, though. As she trekked through the forest, being drawn toward the sound to sate her ravenous curiosity, the birds kept issuing their call, most likely following the scoundrel as they did so. They were unlikely to stop until the person left their territory, or something showed up to remove it for them. That also meant that they would most likely stop crying once she got close, which would probably alert the person to her presence.
	Had the shooter shouted a warning before shooting? She did not know, might have been too far away to hear... this was dangerous. Stupid and dangerous.
	And yet she kept walking, pushing her cart in front of her, driven forward by the [I]need[/I] to know the answers of just some of all these questions. Looking for scrap in the forest could wait; this was [I]much[/I] more interesting.