[I]Oh? This is interesting,[/I] she thought, her walk through the forest coming to a halt as she looked around, trying to spot the bird yelling at her... or at least, yelling near her. It was not a cry she was familiar with, and if her gramps had mentioned this kind of thing, she either had not been listening properly or forgotten about it since. It was not the same as the one they used when scolding, as they were doing to the other person nearby, that much was clear. Also unlike their scolding, this cry was issued only half a dozen times, rather than repeated tirelessly over and over. What purpose did it serve, she wondered? Was it simply informing its kin that another creature was approaching the area occupied by its flock, or... could it be that it was not warning against her, but warning [I]her[/I]? Were the birds smart enough to do that?
	Intriguing stuff, but not really the most useful thing to obsess over. She had always felt more in tune with electrical circuits and mechanical devices than she did with ethology or biology, even if she did love roaming around in the wilderness like this more than sitting behind a desk. She wondered whether she should try to find the bird, but figured that there was really no point. Not only was there nothing to gain from doing so beyond the satisfaction of having discovered the bird’s exact location, but there was also a much more urgent issue she had to deal with first.

	Considering how clearly she could hear the birds yelling at the person up ahead, it was probably fair to assume that it had also heard the bird at her location and reach the conclusion that something had caused them to cry out. She bit her lip, hesitating to proceed any further. On one hand, this other person was an unknown entity beyond the fact that it had a gun - and no flimsy sidearm either, judging by the gunshot earlier - and that it had provoked the spotter birds’ ire. If one were to presume that the birds were really smart enough to try to warn members of other species against danger, and such was actually what the bird had tried to do with her, she had every reason to turn around and run as fast as she could propel her cart across the terrain, with no other means of guarding her life than weaving between the trees and hoping a bullet would not burrow into her back as she fled... But on the other hand, she was really, [I]really[/I] curious. She had never actually met anyone from another faction before.
	So she did not flee. What she did do, however, was kneel beside her cart for a moment, opening one of its side-compartments and looking at the airborne drone she had been using last night, sitting neatly in its charging station. She could send the drone ahead of herself and scout the area from a safe distance, maybe even figure out where the stranger was and what it looked like, so she could better decide how to approach the situation. She actually reached for the drone, with her right hand while her left started extending towards the compartment where she kept her mechanical glove, but then froze in mid-motion, chuckling to herself quietly as she closed the compartment and stood back up.
	What kind of message would it convey to the stranger, she wondered, if the first experience the one had with her was to catch her spying on the one with a drone? If the person ahead was not already paranoid or downright hostile in the wake of last night’s battle, then surely being spied upon like that would be more than sufficient to make it suspicious, and perhaps even motivation enough to shoot first and ask questions later. Scouting the other would put it in a vulnerable position, and people in danger were generally also the most dangerous ones.
	She had already been hit by one bullet and a shower of brass-fragments - not technically “shot” as much as “causing the cartridge to explode - and she would rather not experience that again.
	But despite her reluctance to get shot again, she kept going; her curiosity kept driving her. And to make matters worse, in a further effort not to appear as an obvious threat to her soon-to-be acquaintance, she refrained from drawing her unwieldy pistol. 
	She had to know.

	Her precautions, foolish though they would have been if her objective had been to kill the stranger, proved to at least buy her a few extra seconds of life soon after, when she - as she neared the scolding spotter birds - abruptly found the person causing all the ruckus. Her heart actually skipped a beat, causing her to jump on the spot in surprise when the other was just suddenly [I]there[/I]. As in, [I]right there[/I], appearing in front of her with a gun aimed right at her. A [I]big[/I] gun. With how patiently and quietly the other had waited, the speed and stability with which it had stepped out from cover and its equipment, there was probably very little doubt that this person was a proper soldier. She could not say for certain the gender of the person just by looking at it, with all the armor in the way, nor did it really matter. Whether this was a man or a woman, the gun in the one’s hands was liable to kill her all the same.
	From the one’s speech, though, this was a man. She threw her hands in the air immediately, trying to stifle a shocked yelp as she listened to the other’s burst of rapid-fire questions with wide-eyed surprise. Even if she had expected something like this to happen, anticipating the situation and actually being in it were two very different things. It was like the difference between playing with the parts of a disassembled gun and handling a fully functional specimen... only even more dangerous.
	[I]Am I human?[/I] The question took her somewhat aback, and her first reaction - her fear dispersing quickly once she confirmed that she was not about to be gunned down without hesitation - was to respond to the question humorously, make a joke of him questioning her humanity in the first place, but luckily she caught herself before actually replying like that. This guy was the serious sort, that much was quite evident, and he meant business with that gun; who knew whether he had short temper, and something like that might antagonize him unnecessarily. Better to be concise and give a simple answer to a simple question... though was that not exactly what a machine would do?
	In the end she had to speak before thinking about it too much, or her hesitance would start to seem suspicious, particularly after the grin she had displayed immediately after the question, even if her hands did stay up in surrender. For better or for worse.
	“Yeh, I’m human,” she said somewhat breathlessly. The way she pronounced ‘human’ made it sound almost as though she said ‘who-man’. “M-My name’s Kay-Gee, from Eighfour. That’s, eh, southeast of here?” She chuckled nervously and nodded in the general direction of the spotter birds’ cries. “I was just curious who’d pissed them off.”