[b]Red![/b] The others drift away. It feels like decompression; like her mind shifting back to more adjusted and relaxed state. Bringing her entire nine-coloured personality to bear against a human is overwhelming and disorienting for the human. For them, it's like arguing with a crowd, it triggers certain deeply encoded social threat responses. It's not much better for her; it's like getting someone else tangled up in the middle of her thought process, able to slip in and interrupt her when she's halfway through an idea. She knows she shouldn't do it, she should engage in structured one on one conversations with occasional clearly telegraphed handoffs to different colours. It's less stressful for everyone involved. It was a sign of how stressed she already was that she tried to do something as stressful as full-personality engage Singh. Now that the conversation has wound down she fractures into half a dozen headaches. Blue is going off to stress about Goat, Green is going off to stress about if she's a good girl, Black is going off to stress about the increased operational complexity she has to deal with. Red knows why they all found this reunion so tilting. The best case scenario would have been if he did have a brain bomb, Blue removed it, and then he said 'thank you for saving me, add five hundred - no, [i]six [/i]hundred - reward points to your rescue humans subroutine and then she could feel good objectively [i]and [/i]subjectively. It would have been nice, in other words, if this had been an engineering challenge and not a social one. But headaches were for other colours and most of her plans were either childish or shit. She wasn't just saying that because she was hardcoded to think that plans were stupid either, she'd have reams of objective evidence if gathering objective evidence wasn't exactly the kind of idiot garbage that was the problem in the first place. If she'd left it to the consensus she'd still be moodboarding the proper vibe for the operation to break into Rudy's desk. She'd evidently rather get shot than go through one of those when she didn't have to. So she hangs out to make small talk. It's not a focused information drill like the other colours will do; her primary tools are 'oh for real?' and 'no way' and '*nod nod*'. But she doesn't lack an agenda either. She wants to get him to a point where he talks for a long time about her, the project, his goals and theories, all from the horse's mouth so to speak. Back then it had always been mission, mission, mission. Sent into space as a child of ten to play the galaxy's most hardcore minecraft game. What did it all mean now that she was an adult and could understand things properly? [b]White![/b] "No thank you," said White. "I'm far too annoyingly bespoke for that." She raised her left leg, bent at the knee. One of the glowing joints there whirled and rotated and raised up a finger length metal cylinder. With a hiss and crackle it opened up revealing a stack of what looked like metal coins, tightly packed like a roll of five cent coins. White held her hand out and tipped and five of the bottom-most coins fell out into it. While the ones at the top were still shining and copper, the ones at the bottom were corroded into fragments of verdigris. She tucked these into her pocket and added five more coins onto the top, before pushing the container closed again. She flexed her knee testingly, then bought up the other side. "Of course nothing could be simple," she said, repeating the motions on the alternate side. "I'm using a modernized version of Mr. Volta's 1.0 battery stack. A charged copper-based alloy is flash corroded with acid to release controlled bursts of energy, I manage energy release by increasing or decreasing acid levels in the chamber. I've got battery chambers in my feet, knees, upper thighs -" she lifted the edge of her shorts to reveal the upper port that opens in the same way. "- shoulders, elbows, wrists and two in my neck. Each of them is an independent circuit; if I run down the batteries in my legs then my arms still work fine. I can redistribute power internally, pulling charge from my arm batteries to my legs. That's low-level physically painful and fatiguing but still more efficient than acid-flooding a chamber." She changes out her arm battery coins too, worn down from her earlier climb. There are more burned coins here - she hadn't changed them in a while, something she notes with embarrassment. A clean power stack should be the minimum before going to the gym, White. "Downsides are the internal strain, slow swapping, and the wastefulness and expense," she said, continuing to go through the routine. "The upside is that I never have to deal with degraded battery performance, energy price spikes or lengthy recharge sessions; as long as I've got a pocket full of spares I can hotswap back to full charge. It also has both pros and cons with heat management; I don't need to spend as much space keeping a power core cool, but it does mean I circulate coolant throughout my entire body. I have something like a cardiovascular system for that. The fact that I circulate so much coolant does contribute to the power of my cold, dead robot hands," and here she put one of those ice cold palms against 3V's thigh just to hear her squeal. "But I don't actually know how any of it compares," she admits. "I never really tested any of it. My life is generally sedate, with low level cleaning as the only physical activity. I'm half scared that I've got secret assassin droid kung fu superpowers - if I flood an entire power chamber at once, how hard, exactly, could I punch? I don't know, I don't even know if that'd just blow out the joint. I do know that none of the mainline android models uses anything like this system, and aggressive googling didn't turn up any workout videos for this design."