"[Main Core] is parsing the data using a custom-made [Core] to process the information. Your… friend? Is sending the data to your suit, and [Main Core] is parsing it and traducing it." Ale answered while thinking about how to answer the next part. It was…going to be hard to explain.

"Interesting. I would have thought you had either completely destroyed or completely subverted the Core you had, but you are using it as a personal onboard AI, huh? That is convenient, and since your body can be reconfigurated as needed you can probably get away with doing that." Alexanders nodded at her answer, "As for the other? How much does Vulcanus know? He isn't that easy to decieve, we tried that a few time sending some sleeper agents but he caught in them each time."

They did?

"I… didn't say anything really…" Ale said in a smaller voice than needed. She wasn't sure why, but she was being self-conscious right now. "They…kind of made up their own conclusions?"

Alexanders stared down at her, as did the purple-haired girl.

"Love…I think you are scaring your sister." The purple-haired girl said, love? She loved him? Or was that a weird handle that Alexanders programed on her? As far as [Main Core] was seeing, the code she was using to display her figure was way too complex for most devices to catch on.

"They made their own conclusions? And what are those conclusions?" Alexanders asked again.

"They…think Alexa came from an abusive home, some seem to think that she was part of human experimentation, and a few think she is the daughter of a supervillain?" Ale hadn't really paid too much attention to those, "Part of it is because we don't really know much about human society, so they think she lived isolated."

Alexanders just stared at her.

"Should…do you want to speak with Alexa?" Ale said preparing to pull the trigger.

"...You are Alexa, and Alexandra, at best, what would change is the way your brain processes the data…no wait, did you make a divergent split in your psyche?" Alexanders asked before continuing speaking, "Oh god, I would get canceled if they thought I was dismissing your dissociation disorder…. but do you even have that? You weren't human to begin with, even if you are alive… hmm…I will throw this problem at Eversoul later; the bleeding heart will have a field day with it."

Alexanders seemed to find something funny about that, but Ale wasn't sure what.

"No, for now you are fine as is, your younger self may pester me into asking for stupid things and the older one may find me too handsome and hard to deal with. No, as you are now is fine." Alexanders nodded to himself, Ale wasn't sure about Alexandra, but he was probably correct about Alexa. "So, they think you are a runaway from either a human experimentation site or a supervillain…I can work with that…Do you have any thoughts about solidifying your background?"

What? What was his deal?

"...Why are you helping me?" Ale decided to ask, she was at her wit's end as it was, dealing with someone who she wasn't sure if she could defeat, even at this moment. When he wasn't wearing a helmet, when all she needed was to build a [Gun] inside her head and shoot him…

The eyes of the purple-haired girl staring at her, the cameras that were supposedly turned off… Ale wasn't sure if that would even work, he had showed the ability to read and parse her [Consciousness Stream] the last time they fought. And while right now she had isolated [Main Core] from outgoing communications…

If he had gotten a data dump…if he had a copy of her [Consciousness Stream]...it would be very easy for him to clone one and feed that her thought process, no. For now it was better to play it safe.

"Why not?" Alexanders finally answered, "You have all the right points to qualify as my sister. Why wouldn't I want to help my sister?"

"You are mad," Ale answered back, what kind of [Human] would accept something like Ale as a sister just because of that? Granted she was the pretiestest of them all, but even so. He knew what she was, what she really was. Behind the facade of a pretty human girl.

What she was able to do, what she wanted to do.

"No, I just like to have fun. And right now I am having a blast," Alexanders smirked back at her, "Not all humans are the same, some are more of a monster than you could ever be. And others are just like me. People that want to have fun at the expense of others."

Was it really like that?

"Fine, then please help us." Ale sighed; in the end, there was nothing to be lost by receiving the help of Alexanders if she could solidify her background…That would be a less worry at the back of their head- Well, at the back of her and Alexandra's head.

Alexa probably didn't care about that.

"You heard my sister Sapphire, reconfigure one of our black sites, set up a human experimentation facility, get some orphan's corpses or something, the target..Hmmm…I don't know, the usual. Some asshole trying to get immortality and an undying army of kid bombs or something." Alexanders started setting up the scene, it was…even to the tastes of Alexa, a monumental waste of energy and resources. "Oh right, make the project for the child explosions something bad-taste like 'Happy Meal' or something."

Why?

"Why? It's bad enough that you are making a working delivery system of suicide bombers, and now you are even setting it up with theoretical orphans? You…this is why our company has so many theories about being evil." The purple haired girl sighed while writing down Alexanders orders.

"I mean, it needs to be cliche enough to be feasible, as for the guy at the helm…send one of the P9's that are about to break and put it atop, get the corpse of one of those vigilantes that keep trying to get into our factories and make it look like they killed each other, the date…set it up so that they both died 42 hours after Alexa left the R&D laboratory." Alexanders continued setting up the scene.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

No wait, "You know?" Ale asked, making the blonde man stop his orders, "About when we left?"

"Of course I do, a girl that didn't enter the building left it? A girl with no records mind you, of course someone was bound to notice, thank you by the way. Your little escapade helped me weed out some lazy workers, imagine not noticing they had one extra kiddo running around. What am I even paying them for?" Alexanders grumbled under his breath, "All of them with the same excuse even 'I thought she was part of the tour' and 'I swear she showed up and walked in', I thought they may have been influenced by a Mind Core User even, but there wasn't any mana spike on the site or anything. All the mana spikes came from the outside when you jumped away."

…they thought she was part of the tour? But she wasn't particulary good at acting or behaving like a human, she was closer to…

“[An elephant in a china shop]”

Yeah that, she was awkward, bad at manners and her expressions were cold and detached. Her [Consciousness Stream] was closer to a machine than a [Human] around those times.

How…?

"See? Even you know that is wrong! I'll send you the videos later on so you can cringe at your past self." Alexanders nodded at himself throwing a bracelet her way, it had an engraved eagle on the internal side, "Usually these work by linking with a PC, they give you access to a personal drive on the Saintsworths Server, but you should be able to interact directly with it."

Ale indeed was detecting the ingoing and outgoing data feed, not that she was about to interact with it that way…

"Ask Vulcanus about it, or Hermes. All the Saintsworths heirs use it, so we all make sure there is no malware distributed on it, since we all keep it safe. I already set up your account from my side." Alexanders nodded, Ale for now decided to put it on and check later. She would attempt to get [Core] to analyze it.

Alexanders had said to check with [Vulcanus] or [Hermes], both [Tinkerer Core Users], so perhaps it had some kind of interaction with those types of [Core Users]...Actually.

"What type of [Core User] are you?" Ale decided to ask, she doubted he would answer, but if he didn't then she could use that as a reason to be antagonists to him!

Glory and Alan would be proud of her smart idea!

"Me? I'm an Elemental Core User." Alexanders answered, raising his hand and letting the Lightning course through his body, "I thought that would be obvious…Or are you asking about sub-types? You already found them? Oh…of course you did, you probably used the Nanites to peek around and found it in some other Core user…Hmm…I haven't checked it. My Core is young like yours, but I think that mine will probably be an Information type, probably a Tinkerer subclass for AI or something like that."

"Sub…type?" Ale asked, confused, "There are… subtypes?"

"...Oh god, you are really dumb sometimes huh." Alexanders laughed aloud this time, "If the old men on the board of directors ever think of getting the BioWeapon project into a fast track I will use this interaction…if they ever hear about you anyway, which will be the only reason for attempting to pull more for a humanoid type weapon anyway."

….Rude.

"So, what am I supposed to do with this?" Ale said while crossing her arms above her chest, she was starting to hate Alexanders, and she already didn't like the guy, he cheated, was rude. And looked down on her!

On her!

The gall!

“heh, just show it to Cerberus. The girl should know what it means," Alexanders didn't say what he meant by that, but Ale would check on that later too. "Okay, well. I need to work on your background, go and do your thing, whatever you do in your free time, shoo."

The blonde man made a dismissing motion with his hand, so Ale started walking backward towards the end of the roof. She didn't see him reacting or even paying attention to her, instead he was busy speaking with the purple haired girl, planning the backstory that they had been planning.

"Main Core? Is there any evidence of any incoming data into this thing? Or any data stream focused towards us?" Ale asked while standing on the border of the rooftop.

"[No evidence of any data stream coming towards the external device found a transmission that will link to a private intranet, no other means to access this network has been found so far.]" Main Core answered.

Ale wasn't quite sure if she could believe him, not after happened before, even right now that it was isolated…She would really need to check on it, but for now.

"See you later then…Big Brother…" Ale said throwing herself down the roof, as she was falling she reactivated her Nuzzler Helmet and felt the thing cover her face, with quick motions she materialized her Arm-maments on her arms and stuck one arm into the wall to slow her descent down, "...calculate the optimal route, we are going to the sewers."

"[Calculating optimal route, setting up virtual assistance…]" Ale saw the red arrows and the circles of light on her visor, weird, Main Core wasn't sending it straight to her eyes?

“[...No longer able to interface directly with host anymore.]" Main Core answered, so it was that huh. Interesting, had [Core] restrained it that much?

[Core] must have been ticked off badly by [Main Core] then, Ale could deal with that later. For now though…

"Rhapsody, launching off!" Ale screamed that at the top of her lungs laughing, at the back she could hear the laugh of Alexanders too, but decided to ignore it. She would deal with that one later when she had more data to go by.

She still wasn't sure why he was acting like that, was this also [Human] behaviour? To suddenly decide to adopt random weapons of mass destruction? She had thought that the [Humans] at [Haephestus' Forge] were weird for taking her in.

But now someone who actually knew what she was and how she should behave under normal circumstances was also doing the same?

This was not normal, she would need to check about this, the interactions she had with Alexanders, the circunstances, the changes to her [Consciousness Stream], everything would need to be combed and gone about. That maintenance couldn't come sooner.

That was also why she wanted to go to the sewers, Sam had spoken about working for the Saintsworths, he ought to know about them. Alexandra would need to convince him to help, and to verify this thing that she was now carrying.

The bracelet had been hidden under her Nuzzler Armor now, but the weight was still present in her mind.

She was no longer enjoying the thrill of jumping throught the air as she jumped from building to building following [Main Core] 's guidance, most of the people on the street were already waking up, and she could hear screams at the back about her.

“[Entrance into sewer system found, host please proceed with caution, this entry has not been scouted.]” Main Core highlighted a closed mansewer entrance on the middle of a street. Currently there weren't many vehicles around, a couple of white [Van] with a weird yellow cross on them.

"It matters not, start preparing the shift into [Young Woman Stage]." Ale said taking a deep breath, she would be relegated to the back soon enough, but that wasn't a problem.

Not yet anyway, if Alexandra didn't want to speak with [Eleanore] about this she would let her return, not like they could let Alexa deal with something this serious either way.

"Rude! Cheeky girl is rude!" No matter how much Alexa complained at the back.

"We all know you don't want to deal with this anyway." Ale said as she jumped into the middle of the crossroads and then pointed her feet to the sky, letting the pressurised gas propel her down to the sewer system.

She heard some screams at the back as she punched through the sewer entrance, as she hit it, she made sure to leave a tendril connected to it so the sewer entrance would return to its place.

"Map the route and start the shift as soon as possible, make sure to make modifications to the Nuzzler Armor or make a neutral body suit if those aren't possible." Ale said as she started running, her Arm-mament in hand she started her travel to Sam's area of influence.

She momentarily stopped pulling out her phone, remembering his warning. “Right…should send a message…” She quickly texted him a message and waited a few seconds till the sent check mark was there, and a few seconds more till it had the read check mark.

As soon as that was done she started running, Main Core was at the back preparing the blueprints, but she noticed a stark…not changing thing.

"Main Core?" Ale said aloud as she continued running through the sewer system.

“[...currently not enough privileges to affect host. Please provide the rights…or start a manual change.]" Main Core answered.

"You really pissed off [Core] huh." Ale said with a shake of her head, the fact that [Main Core] wasn't even able to do this…

It was…scary, how much authority did [Core] have? She had thought that only she was able to do that. But if [Core] could do this much…could he also prevent her from using her Nanites?

She had noticed that the Mk1 Gen were only subservient to her…or were they only subservient to her while [Core] allowed her orders to go through?

“[Core]? Please show me the blueprint for my [Young Adult Woman Stage]." Ale said asking to [Core].

A few seconds later, she had a full blueprint with some annotations.

–

Young Woman Stage, Alexandra Saintsworths body description

–

"Well, how hard could this be." Ale said aloud while internalizing the data.

"Please don't screw this up, that is my body." And the voice at the back of Alexandra didn't sound confident, but Ale didn't think it would be that hard, so instead she walked into a dead end within the sewer system and stood with a wall against her back.

She wasn't that confident on being able to focus on walking, staying aware of her surrounding and doing a full body shift at the same time, there was a reason why she delegated this kind of things to [Main Core] after all.

Granted she may be able to ask [Core] to do it, but that one would probably want to use her [Mana] to achieve it, and she wanted to have some in case of an emergency…or in case she needed to fake her [Core Power] with Sam nearby.

And so, Ale started her first honest to god use of her [Nanites] without help. How hard could this be?