There were a lot of questions that Kay wanted to ask about Enn’s helmet, about where they came from – did his old faction make them, or did they simply have a stash of them that they obtained from somewhere? - and just why the Trenians [I]had not[/I] fielded equivalents to them if they ended up with intact examples every time they won a battle, but she ultimately decided against it. Chances were that Enn did not know anything about it anyway, and even if he did it was not relevant to their current situation. Even so, his arguments did little to abate her desire to get her hands on his helmet, and even less to lessen her curiosity. What was it that made the helmets so advanced, she wondered? And why did the Trenians, with access to technology like automated drones and “hell-lasers”, not have the ability to make those helmets themselves, let alone simply copying designs made available to them?
	In truth, it only made things worse that Enn practically turned the helmet into a challenge. “You’d have to be better than the entire Tenian faction,” he said. Well, who was to say that she was not? Granted, it was not all that likely that she was – she was not even the best from Eighfour, and not even a specialist at that – but it was possible. How exhilarating would it be to prove herself better than all the tech specialists of an entire faction combined?
	She was not sure what he had in mind concerning keeping what he had but making himself look less Anderekian, either. If the helmet was indeed so unique and impossible to replicate, did that not make it the single most easily identifiable feature about him?

	Enn’s apparent handicap in normal conversation did present an unfortunate problem, even ignoring how thoroughly [I]sad[/I] the reason for that handicap was. No civilians, no parents, no relatives? She had no doubt that his old faction was big and powerful enough to go to war and actually stand a chance, and that they had a lot of fancy toys and resources… but what was the point of it all? They fought, killed and took to… be able to fight, kill and take even more? They made themselves strong just to be able to get even stronger?
	It sounded as though it was normal for Enn, but also like he somehow knew that it was not how it was everywhere else. The implications of how he had any experience with the concept of civilians and such when he had never interacted with such personally was… disconcerting, at best.
	“I’m… sorry about that,” she told him, wincing uncomfortably at how awkward that sentence felt in her mouth. “That sounds horrible. I’ll help you get on their good side… or, well, at least try to convince them that you can be trusted. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

	And so, turning around to wave her goodbyes to the spotter-birds – presuming and hoping that they would not follow – Kay lead Enn through the forest, heading back to the faction she had actually intended to leave behind with her new acquaintance. It was a long walk, though, and even with thunder up above and the looming threat of aggressive, warlike factions potentially combing through the forest, Kay could not stop herself from chatting enthusiastically with her companion.
	At first she figured she would educate him on Eighfour a little, and talked at length about just how her faction worked. Their primary defense was the forest itself, naturally, which made reaching Eighfour by land with anything larger than a small cart difficult and made it virtually impossible to spot it from the air. She confirmed his unspoken suspicion of the settlement having gates, describing the ten meter tall wall of rock and wood they had erected around the entirety of their land, on top of which their best marksmen took turns patrolling, armed with their own choice of gun for the work. She went on for some time listing the people on the list for guard duty, ranging from boys and girls barely into their teens to some of the factions more capable elders, and their favored guns, which in turn ranged from improvised pipe guns to high-powered sniper rifles, assault rifles and machine guns, though more of the former than the latter. None of their guns were likely to stop the hulking war-machines she had seen last night, but they counted on the dense forest itself to stop those. She also described their flak-turrets in greater detail, pointing out that they had not actually been used to shoot down anything in her lifetime, were manned and manually controlled, and were basically 130mm semi-automatic cannons… a far cry from the anti-air “hell-lasers” his old enemies apparently deployed, but enough to punch through the armor of anything she could imagine being capable of flight.
	Then she went on to talk about the daily life in Eighfour, and how they actually lived as opposed to functioning as… whatever his old faction could be called. They had farmers, obviously, but not nearly as many as one would expect for a faction their size; out of the thousand or so people calling the settlement home, only a dozen or so were actual farmers. They mostly cared for the faction’s livestock and grew a few resilient crops that could thrive even in the shade of the forest, whereas the largest part of their population – the engineers – were those who actually kept the people fed through liberal use of hydroponics, growing their crops indoors under artificial conditions. She could not tell him for certain whether there had been hydroponics tables from the beginning or whether the founders of Eighfour had installed them, but she knew that they had at the very least expanded and improved upon the operation over time, upgrading their facilities over time to support their growing population.
	Which, in turn, lead her to start talking about her own life in the faction; how her people [I]did[/I] grow up with their parents… for most of her childhood, anyway. Her enthusiasm faltered somewhat when she told him the story of how her mother had been late from scouring and her father having gone out to find her and bring her back, only for the fog to appear and presumably swallow them both, for them never to be seen again. Remarkably her mood seemed to pick right back up again, though, as she quickly changed the topic to how Gramps and several other elders had taken her under their wings along with the other orphans of the faction – of which there were disturbingly many, with the state of the world being what it was – and had trained her to become a productive member of the community. She had started out assisting with the vital hydroponics operation and, once she was old enough, had finally been given free reign of her time and skills, to learn, recover, restore and build as much as she possibly could. She eagerly described the various projects she had embarked upon during the first years of her career, from a simple handheld grabber arm, to clocks, to refrigerators, to automated cookers and her [I]first[/I] drone, which she remarked also “lived” in her cart: a small land-based rover affectionately named “Buddy”.
	Her face fell somewhat when she reached the point when she had started tampering with weapons technology. It had gone splendidly at first, with her being able to cobble together pipe guns and the like with ease, and with ammunition being fairly simple to produce once one had the necessary molds and materials. When she had been trying to build something sturdier and more powerful, however, it turned out that she had probably gotten overconfident and careless, because the rifle she had been trying to build misfired, practically exploding in her hands and showering her face in fragments, along with the intended projectile. The accident nearly killed her, she had been told, and rendered her unconscious for quite a while… long enough, it turned out, for some of her fellows to decide that this was an opportune time to test the gate, which they claimed was what had restored enough of her cerebral functions to let her wake back up. She made no attempt to hide her distrust of the others’ intentions and her dislike of this change to her person, but did not outright accuse them of turning her into a science experiment either.
	It was at this point that she felt the need to explain their faction’s possession of the gate and her artificial eye, and told him the story of where it came from. Decades ago by now one of their scourers had come upon a human carcass in a ravine, which had seemed like it had been dead for some time. Whether it was correct to even refer to the corpse as a “human” was potentially a matter of some debate, however, as what they had found had actually been more machine than flesh and bone, with all limbs and most of its organs replaced with cybernetic prosthetics. Though some of those cybernetic parts had been damaged or were outright missing, most of it had actually been in surprisingly good condition and required little to no work to restore to working order. By taking notes on how the parts had been installed on the corpse they had been able to figure out most of how they worked and how they connected to the host and each other… at least enough so that they had managed to plug the gate and an eye from the corpse into Kay while she was unconscious. Now they kept suggesting installing various other cybernetic replacements in her because they would not work without the gate, and were likely more effective than organic parts anyway, but she refused; having a toaster on her face was enough disfigurement for her.
	Since then, she mused, she had been a lot less mindful about doing things for the sake of the faction and had started doing things for herself instead, like crafting the scavenger gun and going out scouring on her own, keeping whatever she found for herself to play with. She did exactly as much as was required to be considered a productive member of society, but no more than that.

	Eventually, a while after they had started encountering scattered tree-stumps in the ground and discernible trails through the undergrowth, Kay looked at Enn with a frown.
	“We’re nearly there,” she told him, waving her hand at him in a somewhat dismissive manner. “Just a bit further ahead and we’ll be in view of the gate. Just… put away your rifle as well as you can and walk next to me, all right? It’d be a shame if they thought you’d taken me hostage and was forcing me to take you here; depending on who’s watching the gate they might hurt you, or worse. Some of the guys are a bit overenthusiastic about getting to test their guns on ‘real’ targets.”