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Save Point: Hard Lines

"What is it with you and her?"

Terrowne shrugs. "I like the way her ass works."

~*~

Ysis is on guard duty today, wearing her full suit of tactical armor as usual despite the heat, and Anubisya waves at her wearily as he staggers in, still feeling the after-effects of the not-so-little contest they had last night. The suit is doing its very best to try and dissipate the heat, spreading its flexile plates outward from the hips and knees and shoulders in a sprayed-out distribution that resembles the prongs of a heat-sink, and exposing the hard-wired optical lines of the vulnerable inner layer, which glow in various colors, making it look like neon magic is bleeding out of her.

"You know that thing is no use if you run it constantly in cooling mode, right?" he sighs for what must be the nth time. "You're supposed to vent it in a terrible burst of steam under awful combat conditions, not just leave it hanging open."

Ysis flicks the 'tail' attached to the suit, a long structure running down off the spine that houses additional hardware and acts as a counter-balance against the weight of the rest of the suit when the user is leaning forward to run or pick stuff up. "Better safe than sorry, right? "

"You always say that. How is it safe if you've got it open?"

"Underlayer might save me. It's tougher than it looks."

He sighs. He's not sure exactly how much is the suit and how much is Ysis, because her lower legs and wrists are suspiciously thin for the weight she's carrying and it seems likely she might have simply replaced them with the same materials as the suit, thin spars of carbon fiber and assorted meta-materials far stronger than the bones they're standing in for. Since he's never seen her out of the suit gauntlets and leggings, at the very least, it's hard to tell.

Personally he has embraced pragmatism and only wears the same light gear as anyone else, his personal argument being that the additional speed of motion and lack of heat prostration maybe offset the risks. Better to try and avoid being hit as much as possible through greater swiftness.

Security for the Citadel Project hardly proves onerous, most of the time. With friendly and mostly worshipful locals whom they have completely out-tech'd, minimal guarding is actually needed in the city itself, and he mostly provides visible presence, finds lost items, sorts out minor disputes and pries apart squabbling scholars when their points of principle collide. He prefers it that way and would rather not be doing the heroic stuff, which in his experience is generally pretty ghastly, especially in those rare cases when somebody finally snaps and bodycounts occur.

He had enough of that stuff in his early days, looking over remains in mortuaries, not a coroner himself but requiring an extensive understanding of how to preserve evidence and knowing what to ask, when to ask it, to extract the insight that would lead to accurate identification of who was responsible. The same skills coming in handy if one of his team got hit while trying to take in that self-same responsible party, in a culture where truly significant weaponry can now be improvised from various household items by someone resolved and cunning and very crazy.

He is keeping an eye on Kilseth, as much as he can when Kilseth insists on running his part of the field research from a remote location somewhere and refusing any security presence. He wasn't in on the Wolfmother Chapel case, when the historic landmark was destroyed during a graduation ceremony, but he has heard about it and Kilseth was clearly involved somehow, even though they could never prove it. Since then he's been clean but not honestly clean, more the polished finish of a skull that grins, to quote the old saying.

The true crazies are harder to find, when sophisticated repairs to the mind are available. Some of them only expose themselves briefly, under the stresses when first reaching their full growth, and then sink quietly back under cover to act normal again indefinitely until caught out.

Really, he's way more guard than they need. When he heard that the Citadel Project needed some reliable security personnel, his history made him everyone's first pick for something that didn't really require any of those sorts of skills at all. This place does not need a 'Judge and Guardian of the Dead'. He likes his newer, quieter job and living a far more peaceful life.

Ysis has gotten herself hired almost the same way. Combat specialist, possibly a little too much of a combat specialist, but rumored to also be skillful at various forms of hacking and informational warfare. Add to that some questionable contacts among the cythura and a fondness for their ideas on integrating technology into their own bodies, and he can see how she'd start to seem like sort of a wildcard to her own employers, to be slowly but firmly pushed out into the colder territory of private security when she was perceived as ever more unreliable.

Being her, she's then gone for the most impressive-sounding high-end security gig she could find. Visit strange timelines! Meet new civilizations and annoy them! Boldly go where no sethuress in a suit of power armour has gone before! Regrettably, at least from her point of view, there has been no real violence so far, nothing to defuse on a roadside, or penetrate and infiltrate until the lights go out. Instead, she stands guard on the same bunch of scholars and researchers he does, and the pair of them go target shooting in a local quarry on the weekend, doing mighty damage to bottles and cans and suchlike amongst the dusty white stones. Great are the powers of the gods.

The main difference is, he considers it a step up. She considers it a step down.

~*~

It's a better situation under which to raise a child, as well. There was some debate over whether it was appropriate to allow children to come along or be conceived on the mission, but in the end it was decided that they should be a mobile yet fully functioning example of their own society. It's a mission bonus of sorts, given that sethura reproductive success is designed to be infrequent and proportional to their population pressure, to offset their indefinitely expansible lifespans. There's a much better chance of getting a child on your mate out in some distant 'research site' than there would be back home in the throng of the great cities. All that empty territory practically cries out to be populated, claimed, stamped with their presence and marked with their seed. It's positively aphrodisiacal out there in the remote places. He likes to take Anubia out to a small tent on a wild empty hilltop surrounded by the wind and the sound of birds, so they can screw like animals.

It'll be Kebechets time to mate too, soon enough, and he looks forward to them introducing her to some of their fun. She's still a slightly awkward teenager, but she'll be ripe and ready any moment now and needs someone to practice with. Tradition dictates that his Anubia should take a suitable lover and share them with her, and so she's been evaluating various prospects over drinks to see who might be a good fit. The need to share means that it has to be someone attractive to the both of them, and preferably somewhere between them in age, and the purely theoretical discussion of what they both might like is meant to draw mother and daughter together.

He's already caught them whispering conspiratorially together, a sudden silence when he walked into the room, faint looks of both embarrassment and excitement. He hopes she enjoys it as much as Anubia did back when he was her practice lover and they shared the intimate affections of her mother. Although they both drifted apart soon after that, when they ran into each other again much later on, suddenly they realized that each of them was exactly what the other was missing, and after an intense night of renewing their affections they've been together ever since.

It's an unlikely tale and not something that could ever repeat, but if she can manage the same intensities of feeling in those moments, then Kebechet will be well on the path to a happy life. He wishes her well more than he could ever say, and sharing Anubia is a small enough cost to ensure his daughters happiness and add new spice to their relationship.

Mind if I take your youngest for a spin?