Two things happened that Dandelion had not expected, in rather short succession. First was the banal reaction to their emergence and reunion, to which the others behaved as though no time had passed at all. Their seeming indifference gave Dandelion a strange rush of powerful emotions, chief among them a cold and heavy feeling; they didn't know its name. The skin Dandelion had made to speak with them was far from complex; in fact it was almost entirely water by mass. Its brainpower was not extraordinary, at least by Dandelion's standards, and the flood of shifting emotions they felt from reuniting with their former comrades nearly overwhelmed them. They stepped away, further from the crowd, retreating into the building, into themself.

Dandelion had a loose understanding of humans, but information they could access on Varo's species was scarce. This, and their innate incomprehension of the concept of magic, gave them no implicit trust in this person. They felt even too insecure to take an opportunistic skin sample. Their response to Varo, the most alien of all the aliens Dandelion knew, was delivered in an utterly dead tone. "Hello, Varo. I'm working on it. They can hide in plain sight, it's difficult to sense them. Somehow."

They queried themself with their pheromone cocktail, asking their greater mass for an update on the situation. Unfortunately, the rest of Dandelion was faring little better. The intruder was doing something to the walls, and by extension Dandelion in them. Their senses twisted and warped, relaying confusing and contradictory information to Dandelion's neural net. They felt dizzy, almost delirious. There was almost no way to convey this anomalous information by smell, especially not in their condition. Instead a much more straightforward message was conveyed back to Dandelion's human-like skin.

[i]I feel sick.[/i]

With this unhelpful response, a puzzled Dandelion was left utterly unprepared for the second thing to surprise them: a swarm of rampaging killbots. Dandelion reflexively dropped to all fours and scrambled away, barely ducking away from a Lexbot's firing laser-blaster. If there was one thing this skin was certainly not prepared to do, it was fight armed robots. Kali barked orders at them, as though Dandelion were her misbehaving dog. Dandelion shouted back at her, their voice now a terrified squawk, their skin's throat closing up from what passed for adrenaline in its basic systems, "I'm doing it!" While Dandelion was not much for intonation these days, they did hope that some of their annoyance came across despite their hormonal squeal.

Even the supposedly simple mind of a basic Dandelion offshoot was still prodigiously quick, a genius in the split-second calculus of life or death. So the still clear-thinking Dandelion's mind raced, trying to hunt down their intruder with predatory logic alone. Access to the security system was highly restricted, access could only be granted by a Renegade. Or pulled from the bleeding meat of their mind, perhaps. What was more troubling was that the security system had been turned on them. None of the current Renegades had the computer skills nor override access (which had vanished with Julian as far as Dandelion knew) to change their targeting program. This suggested an outside interloper, or Julian. The image of Julian's face in their mind lit a tiny spark of hope for Dandelion. They snuffed it out. [i]Don't be an idiot.[/i]

They had only another second after reasoning this far, and spent it to send one last pheromone-message to themself in the tower, conveying the seriousness of the threat. Then they were stomped into juice by a Lexbot. Dandelion's human skin burst like a balloon full of strawberry syrup. The dermis itself shriveled up like instant roadkill, and the Dandelion-stuff that exploded out of it slopped against the walls, floors, and some of the robots. It hardened there like crimson enamel. Dormant. For now.

Deeper in the tower, Dandelion was mobile. It had been difficult, and they had lost track of the intruder, but they pulled themselves free of the strange warp they had created. The result was a dead zone in the tower where Dandelion had to completely evacuate the infrastructure. Far from ideal. However, a new nuisance presented itself. Swarms of spider-like robots were scurrying through the walls, and attacking Dandelion wherever their paths met. The harm caused by their tiny claws and micro-lasers was infinitesimal in proportion to Dandelion's mass, like ticks on an elephant, but their presence was concerning as it showed that the intruder was also aware of Dandelion, somehow. More mysteries.

Another pang of sickness ran through Dandelion's web of nerves, and Dandelion honed in on the sensation. Once, it had been a neat trick. Twice, and Dandelion was wise to it, carefully isolating the affected systems, blunting the neural feedback. The sickening feeling followed the intruder like the stench of rotten meat, and like a bloodhound Dandelion tracked it to the elevator shaft. Nowhere to go but up, it seemed, as Dandelion's internal ballasts shifted with gravity. Dandelion was ready for them. Sheets of bio-mass shifted around the tower, surging like a bloody tide between the walls and floors. Security micro-bots were quickly smothered as Dandelion pushed though them, their tiny bodies crushed with no fanfare. Dandelion pooled their mass at the tower's top floors, where all of the Renegades' treasures and secrets were stashed away.

Like a man hanged upside-down, blood rushed to the head. This was not pursuit; it was an ambush. Dandelion so loved when prey came to them. The intruder ran down their throat, eager to be swallowed. Peristalsis worked independent of gravity.