Chapter Text
Their scanners refused to behave. The sunlight was too bright, and gave false readings. The air was too hot and humid, and for some reason that created phantom proximity alerts of things right behind them, or approaching them, that their optics could not verify when they turned. They were up and running, but clearly not fully initialized. Which shouldn’t be possible – but then, nothing about this made sense.
The worst part was, the jungles they’d encountered on making their way down from the volcano they’d rebooted in were dangerous. Enormous pterosaurs would fly overhead in search of prey - they’d thought those were supposed to be feathered; had the humans’ genetic experiments progressed this far? Were they supposed to be wondering these things? Hypotheticals didn’t sound like they belonged with what little in their memory they had been able to access. They supposed that was the “emergency Magic autonomy” setting they’d noticed toggled on when they’d reactivated. But what did it mean? Were they a Magic? But they were clearly a machine, with a gun for an arm and everything. Magics were semi-ethereal humanoids, and there was nothing ethereal about them. They were all humming motors and metal plates, solid mineral from chassis to core.
Where were all the humans, anyway? They’d reactivated in a manmade structure, but it had been dusty and dilapidated, long-abandoned. The only other sapient life they’d seen was a glimpse of a fleeing Baku’s enormous rear end. This Baku hadn’t responded when they’d tried to get their attention, either. Their language processor was still initializing then, in the Baku’s defense. They couldn’t be sure the sound they’d made had been words. That had to be that strange autonomy setting at work, that had enabled them to want to make sound before they were ready in the first place. After all, here they were wandering outside with half-ready sensors.
A roar reverberated through the trees, and they saw several small birds take panicked flight. Honestly, they were mildly surprised to see they still had their feathers.
Especially since the T-Rex that stalked its way through the trees, in pursuit of something they couldn’t hear, was suspiciously scaly, like the humans had tried splicing it with a Dino. If they had, that mutation had caught. Did it still count as an animal, then? Or was it a monster?
“STOP CHASING ME!” someone called, somewhere ahead of the T-Rex. “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE TOO BIG FOR THESE DAMN TREES!”
So, there was someone the dinosaur was chasing. But they heard no footsteps aside from the beast’s.
Self-preservation protocols clearly directed them to stay hidden or use the predator’s current distraction to flee. They elected the former, just to solve the mystery of what the creature was chasing, and wondered if curiosity was something a machine should have. It seemed dangerously counterintuitive.
They sunk low in the bushes, and watched the T-Rex bend down to swat its prey with its massive snout. A golden sun-shaped mask flew like a discus and landed in the brush beside them, staring out with the enormous eye engraved in its center. A few seconds later, a bright yellow cape fell across the bushes.
“Oh, hi,” said the voice from the mask. Or maybe it was from the robe. They couldn’t tell whether it was their sensors going haywire or just the general nature of Galis. “You’re funny-looking.” A large, luminous hand reached out from the inside of the cape to pull it into the bushes. It looked like it was pulling itself inside-out. “Do me a favor, whatever you are, and play dead, okay? Neither of us are made of meat, so the Rex will get bored, maybe.”
They were going to ask questions, but the tyrannosaur lumbered their way, and it was quickly decided their new companion had been right - play dead! They slumped down and powered down their optics, desperately canceling the repeated impulse to get up and flee or fight as their proximity sensors screamed at them that danger was approaching – at least they were finally beginning to calibrate.
The creature’s breath wafted over them, warm and moist. It huffed somewhere nearby, and something clinked against metal - hadn’t been on them, because their pressure sensors told them nothing.
And then the giant’s rumbling footsteps retreated as it crashed through the brush and trees.
“That was close!” said the Gali. “You can get up now, whatever you are!”
They powered up their optics and looked up at the other monster, all straightened out and hovering as if nothing had happened. Their memory contained nothing like him, but the enormous eye on his mask returned a partial match for Suezo. “You are a…Gali? And a Suezo?”
“Suezo Mask!” said the other. “And you’re a, uh…something crossed with Henger, all right. Whatever! My name’s Damien. You got a name?”
That had been the first question they’d asked themself, but… “My identifier string is corrupted. I can read it, but it isn’t made of recognizable phonemes, nor is its written version available.”
“Can you try to say it?”
“I can try.” They fed the corrupted string into their vocalizer, and an eerie, rumbling shriek came out, lasting long beyond the length of the string.
“Aah! Stop, stop!” Damien protested, collapsing lifelessly into a pile of cloth and mask. “Sorry I asked!”
They terminated the function, and waited for Damien to set himself to rights. “Ugh, that was awful,” he said, his mask making a single clockwise rotation. “I’m not calling you that.”
“It would be cumbersome to call myself that,” they said.
“Well, whatever, I’m sure we can-…”
“Damien?” a voice called through the trees. “Are you out here? Damien?”
“Aw, crap,” Damien said, his voice dropping low. “It’s my dumb breeder’s assistant.”
“You don’t want to go home?” they asked. “I haven’t seen a human since reactivating.”
“You wanna go take my place on the ranch? Because I wouldn’t mind. Heck, she’d have to give you a real name, too. Go for it, friend, knock yourself out.”
“Why don’t you want to return?”
“Because it sucks. Study, study, study, run laps, run some more laps, get yourself intentionally smacked by some logs. Oh, hey, it’s winter! Wanna have a snowball fight? No, because I gotta run more freaking laps! And study! And meditate, which, honestly? I can get away with sleeping and pretending I meditated, let’s be real.” He formed his arms to throw them up in frustration. “It sucks! I wanted to go out on adventures and have epic fights and stuff! And I had some fights, and some adventures like this, but it was all on her timetable and I wanna live by my own rules, you get me?”
They were still processing the sheer amount of rapid-fire input. “No, I do not.”
“For god’s sake! Look, unless you want to live on a ranch, let’s just get out of here.”
“Why do you want me to accompany you?”
“Because there’s safety in numbers! I go missing, she hires teams to find me and bring me back. If there’s two of us, the teams have to bring muscle and that’ll cost her extra. Eventually she runs out of gold or cuts her losses and heads to the shrine to replace me, and I’m home free!”
“You’re asking a stray monster with no name that you just met to help you run away from your human breeder,” they said, “can you confirm?”
“Yes, I am,” Damien said, annoyed. “What about it?”
They crunched that one for a while, before realizing the human was drawing very close.
“Damien? Is that you over there? Who are you with?” their breeder’s assistant called.
They could only conclude that Damien could not react to whatever response they came to if they were separated by the humans. “Agreed. I’ll follow you,” they said, and the pair fled into the jungle.