Kahli pulled Froufrou off her face and glanced down from the side of G'athoong, watching as Omar rushed up to the newscaster and started blabbering belligerently about... whatever it was.

"He's probably talking about the apocalypse," said Sahdi. "He likes to do that a lot."

Kahli groaned and rolled her eyes. "Gee, I wonder why."

Froufrou squelched with an earnest putridity that accurately characterized how she felt about the whole situation.

Kahli squinted. "Hey, it looks like someone just tried to take Omar out."

"What, like on a date?" asked Sahdi. She did a bit of a double take when she said this to Kahli, almost like she didn't mean to say it aloud, or else that there was some hidden meaning in there that she either hoped that Kahli did or didn't grasp.

No, she means as in trying to kill him, interjected G'athoong with thought speak. Just to clarify.

Sahdi looked down and sighed.

"What's her problem?" asked Kahli, glancing to Froufrou with incredulity. Her [paired] companion squelched unassumingly, not interested in butting into whatever was going on here unless she was forced to.

You know, it looks like Unit 5a23 is still down there facing the Flungunglians.

Kahli perked up. "He's fighting them? I thought he was a pacifist. Or maybe a Peacearian."

Regardless, he is indeed fighting them - and making assumedly quick work of it, too. I think it's because some of the arrows they shot at you ended up hitting him. It's kind of sad, it's almost like he's become lost in a bit of a flurry of rage, completely forgetting all the apparently positive associations he'd created in his robo-mind with Flungunglia. Automatons are funny like that, I guess.

Kahli shuddered. She didn't like the idea of being an automaton. She wasn't sure why she was so freaked out by it - it wasn't like she had her tauman consciousness ripped out of her body and ported into a machine or something.

Kahli shuddered again. What an odd train of thought she'd just found herself trailing through! Generally, while Kahli liked to think of herself as a prudent person, she wasn't necessarily much of a worrier. And especially not a person who'd worry about something that indeed seemed to patently absurd. Having her consciousness ported over into an automaton? Was that even possible?

And then, Kahli had another thought. Was this an organic bout of anxiety, or was it indeed something else entirely? After all, Kahli had some new [attributes], some of which she felt she'd barely tapped into. Hadn't her [CLA] - her [Clairvoyance] - allowed her to peek into the fourth dimension, as her system had said? Perhaps this strange train of thought she'd found herself on had been accounted for under that. Perhaps it was more than a strange thought, after all - perhaps what it was was actually an [attribute] bestowed upon Kahli by her new [class] as a [Time Manipulator].

[Clarification: You are correct in that the thought you had regarding tauman consciousness being ported into the body of an automaton was indeed an effective utilization of your CLA. As you continue to use your CLA, it will become not only easier for you to pinpoint when such an attribute is in use, but indeed you will also be able to better glean more information around said informational focal points. Of course, increasing the level of your CLA when you level up by making use of your attribute points will also hold within it a similar effect.]

With that in consideration, she pondered the thought deeply indeed. So, Kahli was seeing something in extrapolated time that had either already come to pass, or had yet to come to pass, and it had to do with tauman consciousness being put into an automaton. Now, there were several things this could mean, all of them incredibly troubling and, indeed, also quite disturbing to Kahli.

Firstly, she considered that she was seeing a scenario in the future wherein she was captured and had her soul ripped from her tauman body to indeed be ported into an automaton. This on its own was quite a grim proposition, yet indeed that said, Kahli did have to note that the conclusion that she'd been captured seemed more like an invention of her psyche than the original spark of inspiration which had clearly been sourced from her [CLA] [attribute]. With that considered, Kahli dreamed of a number of other scenarios. One was possibly that someone else wanted to put tauman souls into automatons, potentially for some sort of evil doomsday scheme. Another was that someone else had indeed succeeded in putting tauman souls in automatons already, and that in the future they would be somehow used to enact a doomsday scheme. Most, if not all, of Kahli's personally considered scenarios - which were of course quite different than the scenarios she witnessed and affected within her system's [checkpoints] - seemed to involve a doomsday of some sort. Her final, and indeed most troubling to her personal, scenario that Kahli was considering was the thought that Unit 5a23 was more than just a sentient automaton. Indeed, what if Unit 5a23 had once been tauman?

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This thought just befuddled Kahli to no end. What kind of a tauman would Unit 5a23 have been, were he one? And if so, for how long had he been so far estranged from his taumanity? Of course his robot body was quite aged, however, appearances could be deceiving. Taubitha, for one, was a year younger than Kahli, and yet she appeared more than several years older to anyone who beheld her, Kahli figured. What if Unit 5a23 was no older than herself? Stranger things had happened, case in point with Taubitha.

Kahli wondered if Unit 5a23 had any idea that he could possibly be a tauman trapped in an automaton body. She figured he must not - after all, his mind seemed definitively unstable, indeed it was excessively prone to losing its place in time and space. Along with that, there was the case that when she told him to forget something, he would do it almost automatically. Such a thought of immediate compliance to someone else's demands shook and disturbed Kahli to no end, and she was indeed quite stricken and disturbed by the thought that if Unit 5a23 had indeed once been a tauman, then the same thing could possibly happen to her at some point.

This was of course a great argument for vigilance. And truly, when Kahli considered the thought more fully she realized that if anything of such magnitude had a chance of happening to her, then she'd surely end up in a [checkpoint] that would give her due time to act. In other words, she was not at such as risk as to have at least some of her precious tauman agency ripped from her hands like a brandylion from a patch. Brandylions were tiny little flowerlike things that grew in patches in the dirt and the weeds all over the place in Nomachiato, but especially in Gifflenberg, Flungunglia, and indeed Clathalia as well. Their buds were spherical, and when they were ripe and ready to reproduce in the strange manner that plants often did, then would swell up with globules of a rather strong brandy within their spherical buds so that anyone who happened upon them could indeed easily get plastered on drinking them, and also because there was rumor that if you indeed consumed them whilst thinking of a wish, they would indeed grant it. Of course, this was a bit of a reproductive strategy for brandylions, as taumans consuming them would without fail also rupture a small sack contained within their spherical bud that would then release copious brandylion spores throughout the air, scattering them every which where. They were known to be a touch invasive from time to time, depending on the locale. They perished immediately in the bitter cold of Blandia, so that was a distinct non-starter, but in the province of D'hablatt, well, they absolutely took over. Yes, one would see brandylions canvassing all over trees, shrubberies, indeed even vines themselves so that it would give the effect as if all of nature was being covered in that inebriating splendor that was the brandylion. It definitely didn't help to mitigate the stereotype that the D'hablattese were extraordinarily prone to the overconsumption of alcohol, either.

With some of her anxiousness abated, Kahli wondered yet another thing. It seemed like she had once again caught herself in a bit of thought loop that was altogether uncommon in her experience. Usually, Kahli thought of things, and then she acted, and then that was that. However, this line of thought seemed to be almost cascading in and indeed turning around, rollup in inside her mind over and over and iterating into a billion pathways. It was tantalizing, it was puzzling, and yet indeed it was also quite terrifying to conceptualize in many ways. However, it was the uncommonness of it that really stuck with her. Why was Kahli thinking in such a manner, all of sudden?

And that was when she had an epiphany. Was not this, too, an affectation her mind had taken on by way of her [class] as a [Time Manipulator]? Was it not her [PER] allowing her to perceive the cascading effects of different events as they enveloped one another, acting at an accelerated rate? It was amazing to Kahli how just one [attribute], or indeed two [attributes], could so strongly affect her line of thought. It wasn't something that she'd considered happening before, well, before it happened - but now that it had, it made all that much sense to her. Being granted such [attributes] by her system necessitated that she be able to use them, and as such, now she seemed... much more capable of overthinking things. Great. But there had to be some implicit strength in these new abilities and tendencies to extrapolate time in such a manner. Kahli was open to figuring out what all that was, although despite said [attributes] she was having trouble seeing how at the moment - instead, it was just annoying her.

"Kahli, look out!" cried Sahdi with a gasp.

And indeed, Kahli looked up to see that Taubitha and Princess had taken to the skies and were charging directly towards G'athoong! Taubitha raised a claw - for she had transfigured her body once again into that of a horrendous beast, not that Taubitha didn't always look somewhat horrendous - and fired a blast of dark purple electricity right towards Kahli's chest. Kahli counted the moments as it approached closer and closer, and used all of her mental focus to slow its crawl to her using her [SPEE] [attribute]. Still, it seemed at once to be doom impending.