“Hey, I said I’d [I]considered[/I] doing it,” Kay chuckled, throwing her left hand in the air in mock exasperation at Enn’s reaction to the prospect of her taking apart his helmet, “but it’s still on your noggin and in one piece, isn’t it?”
	But then her smile diminished some, her expression growing more serious and intense as she looked at him, pushing her cart along as she went. “That said, I don’t mess with stuff that belongs to someone else unless it’s salvage. Not without permission. I’m really curious about your helmet because I figure I may be able to adapt some of the technology from it in this,” she pointed to her artificial eye, “or my drones, but I’m not going to touch it if you don’t want me to. I do know what I’m doing, though; I’m pretty confident that anything I take apart I can also put back together.”

	When Enn mentioned his uncertainty as to whether her “thing” could penetrate his armor, Kay actually let go of the handlebar of her cart – pushing the small vehicle along with her abdomen instead – and went to the holster under her left breast and got out her gun. Even more apparent out of its holster than while in it, it was an unnecessarily big and clunky weapon for a sidearm, with a disproportionally large bolt that seemed more fitting for large-caliber rifles than handguns, along with a peppering of holes everywhere that appeared to be sockets for missing parts. Even the muzzle on it looked weird, if one examined it properly, as it made up of layered segments that did not appear to serve any real function.
	Holding the pistol over her open left hand with her right one, Kay started repeatedly pressing a small button on the side of the gun, causing it to emit a subtle buzzing noise for a second before it started ejecting bullets from the bottom of the – also disproportionally large – magazine sitting in front of the grip, one at the time. What was [I]really[/I] weird, however, was the fact that none of the bullets looked alike; two were identical small-caliber rounds, a third was a slightly bigger and longer round, a fourth was clearly an actual rifle-round and a fifth even looked suspiciously like a shotgun shell.
	“Not with the first to shots it couldn’t,” she told him once the gun responded with a click rather than a buzz and a bullet at the press of the button, seeing as the two small-caliber rounds came out last, “and by the time it’d loaded the third... heh, I guess I’m just happy I didn’t have to use it.”
	She fed the three handgun rounds back into the magazine, earning another buzz as the gun drove them into position within to be ready to fire, but pocketed the rifle-round and shotgun-shell, figuring that it was better to know in advance that she was about to fire those if the necessity arose. Back into the holster it went, then, smiling somewhat awkwardly to herself that she had just demonstrated the “fool’s project”, as the others called it, that was her firearm.
	“I call it the ‘scavenger-gun’,” she told him, scratching her neck embarrasedly. “It can take most kinds of ammunition so that I can replenish my supply from any I find, but it’s kinda unreliable and slow... I have a stock for it, too, in there.” She kicked her cart lightly, eliciting a dull thud. “So yeah... ‘sometimes’ it can pen your armor. It’s stupid, but it’s the only gun I have.”

	“Protocols?” she repeated a bit later when Enn inquired to such things in Eighfour. “I don’t know... normally there’s ‘don’t mention the nuke’, but we already know that we’ll throw that one out the window. Eh...” She rubbed the back of her head as she thought. “I think most of it’s related to mundane everyday life rather than life-changing impending disaster-situations, so I doubt they’ll be relevant.
	As for chain of command, you’ll want to talk to Gramps,” she said confidently. “He’s basically our de facto leader; everyone listens to him even though he’s not [I]officially[/I] in charge. None of the others will dare to make any big decisions without his consent. He’s also the one responsible for the nuke, so that’s a bonus. And no, I’m not related to him – not closely, anyway – he’s just been given the name ‘Gramps’ because he’s kinda old and everyone likes him.”
	“As for where to begin, o Harbinger of Doom,” she grinned, “I’d recommend ‘let’s chat over a cup of tea’. People tends to be a bit less aggressive when their hands are full of hot beverage instead of guns.”