Kahli swallowed air in nervous anticipation as she prepared to walk across G'athoong's scaly hide and inquire about what exact act of service was to be required in compensation for flying herself, Sahdi and Unit 5a23 across the skies of Nomachiato to Clathalia, the land of the water elementals. She looked to Froufrou, and stroked her companion creature's writhing tendrils, which elicited from the strange beast a joyous - yet incredibly stinky - squelch. Then, Kahli took a few brave steps forward, staring down at her big left foot to ensure she didn't lose her balance and topple off the dragon's back then and there.

"Kahli! Where are you going?" asked Sahdi with a tussle of her hair.

"To go talk to G'athoong, duh!" said Kahli with a confused look across her face that doubtlessly cracked some of the ever-hardening plaster covering it. If Kahli wasn't mistaken, she was almost certain she could feel small bits of living wood popping up on her face - she'd have to check the next time she had a chance to look in a mirror.

"G'athoong's head is on the other end," said Sahdi matter-of-factly. "Plus, before you do that, we ought to get Unit 5a23 out of his meditation. He asked me to break his concentration once you were awake, he said he had something to talk to you about."

"Ugh, fine."

Kahli stood there, leaning a little on her big left foot, as Sahdi walked over to Unit 5a23, who was hovering right above the dragon's scaly hide.

"HEY! SNAP OUT OF IT ALREADY, GODS DAMNIT!" she shouted at Unit 5a23.

Unit 5a23's eyelids raised open jaggedly, glowing with blue energy. He outstretched his hydraulic legs and stood on the dragon's scales, cracking his neck socket with a sigh. "Oh, dear. That had been an absolutely excellent meditation session. I'd just started seeing my shadow self's shadow. We were having an excellent conversation about the weather."

"Did you just say you were talking to your shadow self's shadow?" asked Kahli incredulously. "Wouldn't that just be... Yourself?"

"Sometimes it would be myself, yes," said Unit 5a23. "Generally, whether my shadow self's shadow is myself or not depends on how much spiritual refraction is taking place at the moment. You see, if there is a large amount of spiritual refraction then my shadow self, much like my actual shadow, may become duplicated two, four, or even six times! Each of these duplicate shadow selves is the shadow self of one of my other shadow selves, so there's always an even number when it happens. And one of my shadow selves' shadow self was an absolute joy to talk to. Did you know that in their shadowy world, good weather is equated to stormy torrents of rain? That's what I learned, and he told me the bright sunlight was ruining his mood."

"Okay, great," said Kahli with disinterest. "So, um, what did you want to tell me?"

Unit 5a23 suddenly had a look flash across his mechanical facade as if he were loading a response, but the file hadn't been found. Finally, he seemed to finish processing her request and instead looked confident. "Ah, yes, my apologies, Kahli. I'd almost forgotten, and as you know my memory unit isn't what it ought to be. That said, I was able to dust off the cobwebs and remember what it was I was going to tell you once you woke up."

"Wonderful," said Kahli. "So, what was it?"

Unit 5a23 muttered a few things to himself before finally confiding in Kahli that he'd started to piece together some of his past memories, some of his missing memories. He had become fairly certain that meditation was helping him recover what missing and corrupted memory files were still kicking around in his headspace, and that, along with his new ability to cool his overheating identity module thanks to the use of his toaster hardware integration, more and more pieces of his past were starting to come together. Unit 5a23 went on further to tell Kahli that, while he didn't remember where he came from or who had created him, what he did remember was one of the tasks he'd been completing before he became apparently estranged from whomever he'd been acting under.

Unit 5a23 had been performing build and maintenance tasks on something called a Tesserator. He hadn't been told what exactly it was for, but it was a large metal dome lined on the inside with countless transistors and electric circuits that, when activated, generated an energy field that could potentially warp space, time, and reality itself. Understandably, this was a task that living tauman beings were at high risk of perishing under were they to attempt to undertake maintenance themselves, so automatons like Unit 5a23 had been created to perform such tasks. He relived within his meditative session many hours of tedious rewiring and testing out coils, and even a few walks among a half-live Tesserator wherein a field of blue lightning coursed around in the shape of a torus whilst he was working. It had almost destroyed him numerous times, and it was only his great reflexes and spacial awareness that had kept Unit 5a23 from perishing during this task.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"But, worst of all," said Unit 5a23 with a surprisingly foreboding tone in his static-laden robot voice, "I remember what it looked and sounded like when the Tesserator was partially active. And it bears a striking resemblance to the beam of light we observed back when we were fighting that evil alien, Lloyd. I do believe that Tesserators, like the ones that I worked on, are being utilized in order to tear open holes in reality itself and create perforations between the land of the living and that of the dead."

"Wow," said Kahli. That... was definitely something to think about. After all, if what Unit 5a23 was remembering was correct, that meant that - most likely, at least - whoever was creating the perforations was the person who had created Unit 5a23. And, along with that, whoever created Unit 5a23 was intentionally releasing large swaths of skeletal beasts all across Nomachiato. In short, whoever created Unit 5a23 was evil. It was a wonder Unit 5a23 himself seemed to be, at the very least, more of a lawful neutral than anything more malicious. Then again, he'd teamed up with Kahli ostensibly, and she was [paired] to the Harbinger of Doom... It was difficult to say what his motivations were. Kahli figured it was even difficult for the automaton himself to say, as he was still unaware as to most of his own history.

"Unfortunately, that's all I remember," said Unit 5a23. "I don't know why I was working on the Tesserators in the first place, other than because tauman beings can't, and I don't know what the Tesserators were originally created for either. Honestly, Kahli, I'm not sure I was ever aware. However, I can say with some level of certainty that the perforations we've been seeing are being generated by Tesserators. Whether they are the same Tesserators I worked on, and whether they are being run by their original creator, is unfortunately anyone's guess. Regardless, it seemed pertinent that I let you know as soon as you awoke - the last thing I'd want is for you to think I was hiding something from you, Kahli."

"Thank you, Unit 5a23," said Kahli with genuine gratitude. "Please let me know if you remember anything else."

"Absolutely. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to continue my meditations. It is my understanding from the dragon that this flight will take quite a while to conclude, and I'd like to get as much shadow work done as possible," said Unit 5a23.

"Shadow work?" asked Kahli.

"Yes, it's a feature of system based meditation that you can, as I mentioned earlier, interact with your shadow self - or selves - face to face while in a meditative state. I assume you've meditated since you got your system?"

Kahli looked down at the dragon's scaly hide in shame. "No... Honestly, Unit 5a23, I was never really good about keeping up a meditation practice, even before I had a system, and I haven't felt the need recently anyways. It's not like I've had a lot of down time recently."

Unit 5a23 looked a little offended. "Well, regardless, you ought to give it a try now that you've got yourself a system, and especially now that we're riding this dragon. Dragons fly fast, but the distance we have to cover is vast, and it'd be a constructive use of your waking hours to devote some of your energy to improving your meditation. If you'd like, once you've had a chance to talk to G'athoong, you can come back here to me and I'll train you on best practices. It'll get some of the heaviest lifting out of your way for you, since meditating with a system is wildly different than meditating without, and you sound like you'd fare about as well as an absolute novice."

Kahli felt more than a little miffed at Unit 5a23 calling her an absolute mollusk, but she wasn't going to take it to heart. He was, after all, a piece of stone cold machinery. Either way, she figured now was as good a time as ever to finish talking with Unit 5a23 for now and go over to talk to G'athoong. Heading now in the correct direction, Kahli trudged carefully forward, still extremely mindful of every step she took, until she realized something.

The strange sixth sense that she'd acquired through her big left foot by way of her [skill], [Seismic Sense], seemed to not be sensing anything. This was regardless of the fact that she knew the [skill] was activated. Kahli found this puzzling, but she decided not to immediately dwell on it. She'd waited long enough to talk to this dragon.

Kahli quickly approached a large, semi-translucent eye with a big, dark slit for a pupil. She stood before this moist, oozing specimen and tried to hide her discomfort, though it was exceedingly difficult.

"G'athoong? Hey, G'athoong, can we talk?"

Immediately, a chipper, high-pitched voice thought spoke into her head. Well, howdy! You must've been sleeping beauty, huh? Glad ya finally woke up!