"I don't want a cat. No offense, Blanche. But I don't like cats," said Machia. "I have a - weird grudge against Gata. When I was small, I remember her - doing it wrong. Fighting HexXer. Losing, over and over. HexXer just downloaded her, was inside her ears, inside her [i]instincts[/i]. Didn't matter how fast she was. I could always see where she was going to be, and HexXer could see it too. I wanted her to win but - doesn't matter how many squares the Queen can move across the chessboard if the hand controlling the pieces doesn't want her to move. So. I started studying HexXer instead."

HexXer. The Red Witch of the Hexadrome; the ultimate Placer. Her power was eye-wateringly simple: [b]Vade Retro.[/b] With it, she could move people around. Herself, her opponents - in crimson dress and featureless white mask, she whirled and danced in her slow waltz, and by the end she stood alone on the scoring zone. 

"Vade Retro. Simplest move there is. You could buy it off the shelf at mod stores back when HexXer was getting started. Same idea as the levitator over there, it lets you manipulate kinetic energy just a little bit. The technology isn't complicated, none of it's a secret, but doing it in real time? Doing it to the entire arena at once? How can you focus on an abstract point in space and decide its kinetic properties should be different, and then communicate that desire to the machine? At Aristeia! speeds? The only people who really use it at all are skateboarders who cluster around getting cool slo-mo effects during jumps. I thought I was going to be different - but I wasn't. After ten years of practice, I barely got the hang of Vade-ing myself, a tiny bit, let alone anything else."

Titanomachia was famous for her preternatural dodges; her ability to slip and slide into impossible angles and accelerate in counterintuitive ways. Different enough in application to HexXer's chessmaster control of the entire Hexadrome that nobody had publicly drawn the connection yet. 

She looked up at Madeleine. 

"I hope that's a good enough introduction for Blanche to protect me a little," she said. "But I don't know what animal I want. I chose horses as my DNA model because I thought there was a synergy between their strength and Vade Retro's precision - and there is, it's very effective, I'm happy with my choice and I intended to surpass HexXer by doing what she did while also being strong as fuck. For a guardian, I need something that compensates for a limitation in the same way - I'll think about it, and rely on Blanche for now."