[quote=@Tatterdemalion]POTENTIAL 1

“Oh, so first you didn’t want the jumpsuit, and now you do?” Sara dangles it just out of reach with a grin. “Come on, Locker, make up your mind!”

She’s tapdancing on the razor’s edge of danger, but, really, this is Sara. She can’t not! She has to [i]know[/i] what Locker’s going to do! Maybe he’ll make a terrible choice, maybe she’ll push him into making a better one, maybe she’ll push him into the worst choice— but sitting there meekly and trying to be nice? She literally cannot do this thing.[/quote]

He comes at you just like he has ten thousand times before.

When you've sparred with someone that often the entire character of the fight changes. All of the obvious tricks and ploys get tried, adapted to, and cycled out. Frustration gets burned through leaving focus behind. Slowly you come to stop expecting your opponent to make mistakes so instead you come to be thinking about their thought process, where the algorithm of strategy and physicality is going to take them. He can't hold back because then you'd have him, and it's the same with you.

When he started the lunge it was confused, impulsive, but then your roles snap into place and you can see the passion leave him. You can see thoughtfulness behind his eyes - Locker always did his best thinking while someone was shooting lasers at him.

[quote=@Phoe]
There was a moment in that room where Errant simply smiled through gritted teeth and said "No problem". That was the first moment she'd ever really regretted having real feeling in her hands again. It was an awkward moment that had her questioning how much of her toughness was just the ability to switch pain reception off when it became inconvenient. But that was then. 

This is later, in the hospital parking lot. There's still not much in the way of light here: just the neons of the signs blaring above them, the golden lights running through Errant's implants, and the red ones in Cinders'. Errant reaches her arm down, clasps it firmly around Cinders' wrist in a way that prevents her from squeezing back in turn, and pulls her back out of the wheelchair and onto her feet again. 

"Sorry about not letting you walk out under your own power," she shrugs, "Hospital protocol. It's nothing you did wrong, they just need it to be my fault if... you know what, that doesn't matter, never mind. Also sorry I don't have a car waiting. You know, I've got licenses to operate fourteen different vehicle types, and I never drive anywhere for myself? Not that I can afford most of the things I'm allowed to-- um, a-anyway."

She turns toward the street. In the same motion, her hands pull out an ash-gray beret and automatically angle it on her head so that her face is blocked from the view of the parking lot cameras. She shrugs again, but stays quiet about it. It's a cute look, if nothing else. She grins, this time without pain. 

"All right then Cinders, unlimited sanction: tell me where we're getting food. And then we've got a lot to talk about, I think."[/quote]

She's calmed a little, under the neon. The air and atmosphere is different; this is a breath of normality and familiarity, not a job interview with an idol in a hospital bed. The topic of the conversation has come down to something simple and things feel under control again. You can feel tension leave her, and you're a little less worried of her twitching wrong and sending herself through a second floor window.

"Sure. Sure," she said. "There's a really good sushi place around the corner which I'm ninety percent certain is the cover for an assassin."

At first you thought she was joking, but as soon as you step in through the door you get the exact same vibe. As soon as you step in through the door the owner gives you the unblinking threat-assessment stare of someone running a combat computer in the back of their head, before giving a slow bow without breaking eye contact. 

Cinders hops up onto a stool without even pausing and instantly breaks her chopsticks. "Whoops haha," she said.

[quote=@Balmas]Victor harrumphs in the completely unsatisfied way of a person who was hoping for a different answer.

"Not sure I have a good answer for that, buddy. 'What is my purpose' is a stumper that's been plaguing philosophers since time began, and that only gets more complex when you factor in superheroes and pepper and crap like that. Humans aren't built to a purpose, aren't fashioned to a schematic."

He pauses, an abrupt thought flickering across his face. "Although," he allows, "I actually kind of was, wasn't I? Not, I mean, not like. I wasn't programmed into a vat somewhere, so that nine months later it'd spit out a genius. I think, at least? I mean, Mami doesn't really share that side of her research, and I've not dug into it properly.

"So maybe my instant, instinctual, and incredibly trite answer of 'to bring joy' isn't so far off. We don't have a native function built in, so the one I've chosen to pursue, really, is to help people. I'm getting better at doing it in a non-pushy way, but. Yeah. Is that... Does that answer your question?"[/quote]

"Function: Help people," said Bode. "That is a very difficult function. It is very open ended. I understand why you created an AI now, up-scaling your abilities to a global level seems like the only logical way to accomplish something like that. Following that logic, though, training Prometheus into a good person seems like the only way to sustainably accomplish your function."

[quote=@eldest]Being an AI does not feel like the super unique thing it was four months ago. There's her, but then there's Prometheus, and then Bode turns out to be one, and there's one made by Doctor Sylvanius (KING OF MARS, the missile helpfully spams her with). Not that she's complaining, mind you, it's neat to see others, and they all are very unique still. It's just a different thing than she expected, when she woke up.

Oh right the missile.

She starts staring at it, watching it approach (she's not feeling particularly threatened here), and idly drifts so that the missile's path won't hit the car. And then she starts her own countervirals. Carefully, mind you, trying to perhaps inoculate, or even just shore up, a node at a time. Maybe she can make a friend here?

[Support: 4][/quote]

What you're not expecting is for the Grave Beast - as it helpfully informs you it's name is - to put you in charge. It's not trying to enslave you, it's put your thought process directly at the core of its being and its entire extended bulk is shifting to respond to every one of your thoughts and impulses. That dizzying perspective the last time you encountered it makes sense - it's trying to cram your mind directly into its broken amalgamation of thoughts in the hopes that will straighten everything else out.

There's a problem, though - it's done exactly this multiple times. All the various nodes of the Grave Beast are sending insane, contradictory commands at each other constantly. This results in massive systemic paralyzation as a thousand nodes scream their raw functions at each other and only occasionally compromise by accident. Your process of starting countervirals is being replicated all through the network and is causing a massive response flood of incoming data, significantly more fearsome than the initial attack.