75 - Ekarone Days Pt. 2 [Cherno]

On a day that stood out from the others in no particular way, Krahe sat with Casus, smoking while the Banisher read a thick tome of history. On the table, she had stacked up several books of her own, set next to a plate stacked with small slices of ekarone. It reminded her very much of that time at Favonia’s safehouse, and thus, a question came to mind.

"I'm curious - what is Favonia like? Looks, demeanor, everything. Paint me a picture. You seem to respect her a great deal."

Casus briefly furrowed his brow, moving his bookmark before setting down his reading material.

"That is… A good question. Well, to begin with, take your shape, adding perhaps two or three cup-sizes to the chest. Then, paste my appearance overtop, manner of dress and all. Change the skin tone to dark, dark purple, transitioning into lilac at the lightest points, where skin-plates intersect. Her hair is more or less like mine, but about a third longer and bound into one huge braid. Oh, and ears without points."

"Is she your... Sister?"

"Close enough. As for her demeanor... Again, not unlike you, but significantly more reserved and clergy-like in public, while being significantly more violent, bordering on psychotic, in combat. She has a great deal of anger that she has compressed within herself, and she releases it to fuel her violence."

"You don't think I'm psychotic? Even a little bit?" Krahe raised a bemused eyebrow, exhaling a puff of smoke as the corner of her mouth upturned slightly.

"After Slaughterhouse Nine? No, I would not say so. You are... Entirely in control, at all times, regardless of how psychotic your actions may seem. The few times I had time to observe you in combat, it looked as though you were executing on a five-step plan you had rehearsed a dozen times before taking the first step. That is, in itself, more unsettling than Favonia's unrestrained rancor."

"I'm flattered that you think I plan as far ahead as five steps. It's usually three.”

"Back at Slaughterhouse 9, with the Inax. How did you know seduction would work?" Casus returned a question of his own.

"He had that look to him. Not physically, his eyes. You've got the exact opposite. Doubt any seduction could even budge you, assuming you've got something between your legs."

"Wh- Of course I do," Casus defended himself. For a moment, Casus almost looked and sounded offended. Almost. It was hard to tell through his faceless armor. "Only one-eyed banishers are completely sexless, and only insane overgrafters actually get rid of those parts... Or extreme ascetics, I suppose. Did you do such a thing? You said you used to be more metal than meat."

"Of course not. The opposite, if anything. I had enough space leftover to fit both kinds, but it was a pain to sort out all the tubing. Half due to how packed-full of hardware I was, and half because I used a biocapsule-type central unit; everything was suspended in biogel so it could move around a bit in there. Since the sexware unit was a prototype I would sometimes get lube leaking into my coolant circuit and vice versa, ended up paying one guy to develop a coolant that could also act as lube in exchange for schematics for the unit. Bastard got rich and tried to have me disappeared, ended up helping a rival of his perform an armed takeover so I could kill him… Then my employer for that job tried to get rid of me. It was a three-year-long clusterfuck."

She laughed.

"It saved my life once, y'know. I had ruptured a coolant line in my leg and the guy chasing me slipped in it."

"You said... Both kinds. Male and female?"

He sounded more curious than anything, not surprised as she had expected.

"Yeah, hell of a thing, the biggest innovation in programmable biogel was spearheaded by a sexware company. Even fullborgs like me wanted to screw, but all that bleeding edge hardware left little space, so they figured out how to make biogel that could stretch and inflate and deform in all sorts of ways with energy current. Had all sorts of shape settings too. The model I had went from completely concealed inside two cubic centimeters to a ten-incher in twenty seconds flat, and I could take something up to..."

She pushed her thumb into her stomach a bit above the navel.

"...Around here. Even then, not 'cause I couldn't stretch further, but my main power unit was in the way. Someone paid me to steal the sexware unit and then got killed before I could deliver the goods, so I cleaned out the poor sap's datavault and kept the sexware. Didn't get to use it more than maybe ten, eleven times before I died, but it was fun."

"Were grafts of that type common? I've seen similar grafts a few times, but nothing so common as to find standardized models. Usually custom work ordered by hedonistic contractors or others of sufficient wealth."

"I'd say... Ten percent of the population. Twenty to thirty if you ruled out normies with minimal chrome. Er, grafts. Forty to fifty percent if you only counted the sort of people I dealt with. Megacity Gamma was... A grim place. It used to be a saying that you had to pick two out of sex, violence, money, and drugs, and then go hard on those two things to cope with how fucked the world was. I've always thought it was a stupid saying, but then, I did go hard on violence. And money. And sex. And drugs, if you count combat stimulants, though I never did use anything recreationally."

"You shall have to describe the full extent of your former grafts to me someday."

Rather than wait for someday, Krahe casually started listing off in no particular order.

"Graph-fullerene skeleton, two continuous-flow hearts, synthetic blood. Moravec Transferred brain - turned into an artifact, so to speak. Much more durable, not susceptible to concussions and the like. Self-contained digestive track with one-third the footprint of a normal one, armored skin, an invisible sense-field out to around a meter, actual invisibility.”

She took a drag of her cigarette. A slice of ekarone followed it… And she continued where she had left off. There was still so, so much to get through, even for a surface-level skim of the interesting parts.