[b]Blue![/b] There's something electric about a [i]challenge[/i]. Not a test, not Green's obsession, that world where there are right and wrong answers (no matter how much the tester declaims that they're just observing or gathering data; there's always an agenda in their mind). A challenge is... about having to become a better person than your opponent. Coming from a superior it's even more than that; the choice then is about reaching deeper into yourself to find some new part of you, or identifying what makes them powerful and bringing it into yourself. What could be more intimate than imitation? To respond to defeat by becoming your conqueror? To become the sword beneath your chin? It means becoming an active participant in your own subordination and exaltation. It means letting honour chain you and gag you so that it might constrain your weakness. So, then, her research for 3V carries her not towards revealing clothing. Not towards open and flowing silks and the expressions of softness and submission. Instead what she chooses for her presentation are kinds of armour. Heavy, metallic, noble, defensive, proud. Hair bound in tight ponytails. All these defenses and no protection at all. The armour can be undone with precise blades, or infiltrated with wandering hands. The hair can be sent tumbling down at a mistress' whims, or left bound up in a mockery of discipline and strength. This is what Blue presents; not vulnerability, but strength that nevertheless cannot stop you. This is what she will be for you for as long as your own strength can hold. [b]White![/b] There's always so much to take in with Euna. Stories that run deeper, knowledge and wisdom dropped in passing, plans for the future and echoes of the past. She's a fascinating person, a [i]complete [/i]person. She can see why 3V likes her. She likes her. If she were a different colour she could easily focus on her and her secrets to the exclusion of everything else. But she's here to master herself. She's hyperaware of her thought processes. She doesn't register physical threat from either of the two combat postures Euna takes. Maladaptive? She reads physical threat in slouches, swaggers, hands in pockets, the physical sloppiness that indicates that someone is intoxicated or a cop. These movements are more objectively dangerous but she does not respect them. Not yet. Some part of her wants desperately to do something cool. For some hidden kung fu routine to kick in and her to deliver a sick double roundhouse kick out of nowhere. 3V is watching, and Euna seems like she wants that as well. At the same time she's afraid of sudden machine power and breaking cybernetics. The pressure she puts on herself now that she's finally testing this intense. She wants to go through the mechanics of the motion perfectly in advance; integrate all the advice she's heard about putting her hips into the blow and twisting the strike on the way. She wants to think her way out of the problem; to activate her holographic projection armour and approach this like a tactical puzzle. She wants to call in her backup and engage as a swarm, using all her hands and arms in unison. Those aren't the test. None of those are the test. Those are different, unrelated tests that she knows that she's good at and can pass and it cuts down on the uncertainty and risk if this test was secretly one of those tests. Brown made a bit of an art out of socially engineering tests like that for a while; impressing testing staff with what seemed like a unique and out-of-the-box answer that was really just her repurposing previous outputs to new problems. The conflict that had created with Green was the impetuous for her development. White closed her eyes hard shut as she sorted again through her mental sloth, through the complex intellectual knots and justifications she used to avoid doing something really simple. None of that. None of it. Thought was both unhelpful and undesirable. So she opens her eyes, steps forwards, and throws her punch. * She's never seemed less human as she leans into the technique. There was a basic human relationship with violence and threat that just didn't apply to her. She doesn't flinch when muscles tense or feint, there is no hesitance or instinctive panic, there's no fear and no reflexes. Each punch is conveyed with an engineer's understanding of hip and feet and weight but without the lizard brain evasion that comes with a biological brain optimized in the first to avoid pain. Androids don't fight like this; androids have human brain patterning at their core. November fights like a [i]machine[/i]. It's honest. But something curious happens when Euna switches to the offense. Instincts do come out, just not human ones. November intimately understands high speed deflection of fast-moving objects along with precision engineering. She doesn't come close to landing anything but the instinct is visible in certain exchanges - she reacts to a blow like it's a high speed piece of astrodebris; not dodging it so much as looking to land a slight redirection slap that will change its momentum and direction. If the gesture is repeated more slowly she'll even instinctively aim for disassembly points in Euna's cybernetic limbs. None of this will get her past the basic reality that she's not dealing with zero gravity. She also has no understanding of grappling or wrestling. Probably the biggest problem is that she is extremely bad at the instinctive human ability to track something by sound and air pressure; once something leaves her field of vision she loses track of it and doesn't have any situational instincts that make her recognize that as dangerous. There's potential here; this can be trained, honed and refined - it's just the case that peak performance for her probably looks nothing like peak performance for a human.