"I'm thinking that stimulants are not a valid path forwards," said Titanomachia suddenly. She slid a combination of lenses into place, then picked up her dimscalp. She slid over a stool and settled into place, light beams falling into place, focus aligning - and mouth starting to meander as she worked herself out of her tilt into a more comfortable, familiar focus. "Which is a [i]shame [/i]because there's [i]affinity [/i]there."

The dimscalp was a silvery hook, like a crochet needle. It had a dimensional phasing effect that allowed it to pass through the skin without cutting, only a molecule-tip rematerializing to begin the long and painstaking work of knitting together and strengthening aching muscles beneath the surface. 

"Which is particularly frustrating because I'm running up against a similar limit in my own design," she went on. Despite her hands being steady and clinical, her voice was anything but. A deep frustration was coming to the surface. "The paradigm of [i]Vade[/i]-enhanced physicality has a bare level of function but it is not enough. Even if I was able to continue to explore that path without interruption I would have dropped out of the league sooner or later because there is a ceiling on its results and I am not going to achieve my ambitions with a midwit patchwork design. I need - I need to redesign fundamentally, and that means coming all the way down from where I am now because the peak of that mountain [i]is not tall enough."[/i]

Despite the intensity in her voice, her hands are steady. The steadiness of the hands was a precondition to everything else; control in one place enabling weakness in another.

"And I see the same thing with this path. Xoxic forced me to seriously consider it, and the worst thing I see is that there's something there for you. Practice, refine, comprehend, manage the side effects, you could be an international round of sixteen player. Maybe even round of eight some years. But I can't see how you'd ever break any of the Legends - not Bixie, not Hazard, and not HexXer. It'd take everything we both had to get you that high and there'd be no space to deviate once we were on that path and - and the path would suck anyway!" Suddenly she was genuinely carried away. "Graceless. Joyless! No colour, no flair, just another chem-dog like Hammerhead, and there's an entire industry of idiots like Hammerhead trying and failing to make it. Just like there's an entire industry of people trying to ride fucking cybernetics to the -"

Her free hand reached up to brush your hair away, then gently rest against the surface of your cube. Tracing the outline, one, two, mirroring the motion of her other hand reconstructing your shoulder.

"There's something better," she said. "Something that doesn't cap out. Something that can go all the way to infinity. To join the pantheon of the legends and become eternal. You're good at converting stimulants into effect. I'm good at predicting people enough to dodge through them. Those aren't sufficient; not stylish, not unique, not transformative. The technology isn't there for what I need to do."

The words fell away into silence again, only the soft hum of her dimscalp's engine.

"Sometimes I think you'd do better without me," she said. "There's so much potential here. I don't feel qualified to shape it."