Bottle after bottle, the Word-bearer continued pouring stimmix into his former subordinate’s mouth. When questioned if the lizard wouldn’t drown, he stated plainly that “Oh, only the builder caste has that flaw. A warrior’s breathing tubes are separate from the mouth and throat, same for us thinkers. Some thinker clans can even breathe water, but I’ve been told it’s unpleasant at best.”

He cracked open another bottle and started pouring, only to stop. He narrowed his eyes in thought and continued, muttering that “...Eh, he should have room for one more.” 

Armless took another sip of his stimmix, having nearly emptied the half-liter bottle in the meantime. He could feel something moving under his “skin”, his insides rearranging themselves even after he’d left the cockpit. Vezkig took notice of this, and kept trying to get a good look without making it too obvious, to the point where it distracted Armless from the view enough that he felt the need to speak out. “We’ve got time, and I know you brought your gear. You know where the plugs go,” he encouraged the lizard, willing the plating over his left arm’s elbow to move out of the way and expose the ports underneath. The arm and its plating may have changed shape, but the ports were still the same. It didn’t take vez more than a couple seconds to spring into action and clamber into the rover’s storage space to retrieve his tools. His enthusiasm was not staunched even by the requests of more drink, which meant he had to make three trips to get everyone what they wanted along with his diagnostics tools.

“Now,  don’t move while I plug the cables in,” he warned as he meticulously maneuvered each of the three plugs into slots near what would be Armless’s elbow, as though the machinery involved hadn’t been designed and required to withstand decades of abuse without maintenance.

Armless needn’t respond beyond overly cautiously tipping his hand to put the fresh bottle in his mouth so he could bite the cap off, spit it out, and take a drink. It merited a toothy grin on the Word-bearer’s part, and an annoyed huff on Vezkig’s as he began feverishly click-clacking away at the keyboard of his portable terminal. It looked like a heavy-duty mechanical keyboard made for someone much larger than him, with a series of positively antique hololenses strapped to its spine and made to project a generally uniform “screen”. As far as he could tell, the whole thing was fuelled by a thin plug that Vezkig plugged into an unseen spot on the left side of his torso with a shudder and a hiss of “Oh-h, don’t think I’ll ever get used to that.”

A few minutes in, Armless felt a surface-level data access request in his mind, and approved it without a second thought. His benevolence was rewarded by further frustration on the engineer’s part, clearly articulated with exclamations such as “That doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense!”, “Butter me up and roast me on a stick, what the hell?!”, and “At this point, I’m just ‘bout ready to start believin’ blacktech is magic all over again.”

Each time he became too frustrated to continue, he would spend the next few minutes drinking and chatting with the Word-bearer, only to return to work with a renewed curiosity. The perpetual, almost rhythmic click-clack of his keyboard soon faded into the background noise, and for the first time since he awoke, Armless felt at peace.

At this very moment, there was no immediate threat. There were no things that needed doing here and now.

There was more stimmix than he could drink, an endless field of flowers, and comrades who took him as he was.

Over the course of the next hour, he drifted away into a state of inward focus deep enough to be considered sleep, outwardly signified only by the fading of his eye-lights. He was still subconsciously aware of his surroundings, his body was as awake as ever. Armless remained like this, gazing empty-eyed out towards the horizon, taking slow, deliberate sips of stimmix whenever Vezkig stepped away from the keyboard. At some point, he felt Red-eye’s body shifting as he woke up and waded off into the flowers in the direction of where he collapsed. A few minutes later, Rika stirred in her seat, the driver’s side door opened, and she stepped out as well, walking off in the same direction as Red-eye. With Rika gone for now, the Word-bearer moved from his spot atop one of the seats in the back to the passenger seat in front. Eventually, time seemed to melt away, despite his internal clock.

Until his machine-self woke him with a chime of “Dataplugs disconnected from left upper limb module.” 

His eye-lights flickered on, but he knew better than to scare Vezkig by turning around, and instead he just spoke up at a low enough volume that it wouldn’t startle him, a simple question of “Finished?”

Vezkig muttered “Mmhm,” while he hoisted the keyboard onto his shoulder, only to stop halfway across the rover’s interior, double-take, then continue walking, clearly unsure whether Armless had just spoken or if it was his own mind playing tricks on him.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

He took the time to use his hoverslate to avoid having to climb into the storage space this time, only to groan out in annoyance when Armless dispelled his suspicions with “Get me another bottle while you’re back there.”

The tip-tap of claws against metal. The distinct crack of an opened bottle. “Mrrngh... Here,” the lizard muttered as he placed the open bottle next to the half-dozen of empty ones at Armless’ left side. He had taken a green bottle for his own, cracking it open while he walked over to Armless’s right and took a seat next to him. A long sip, a grimace characteristic of an unpleasant flavor that still had an appeal, like black licorice. “Whoever built yer body didn’t want no-one without the proper clearances rootin’ around in there. Two thirds of the data I managed to pull were encrypted, and the one third that wasn’t don’t make sense out of context,” he mused. A long huff - almost a sigh - escaped his nostrils.

Vezkig raised the bottle to his mouth again, but before he could tip it back, a beam of lilac ripped through the lower half of it. The stimmix within splashed out onto the flowers beneath, the beam flying off into the distance before it faded a few hundred meters past the rover. Out of instinct, he froze in place for a split-second, then hopped up on his feet and hucked the bottle at something - or, as Armless assumed - someone in the distance. He fully leveraged every ounce of strength his diminutive stature could muster, something in his chest whined, steam vented from his back, and he was rewarded with the thunk of a plastic bottle bouncing off a warrior’s skull. 

Armless couldn’t help but audibly chuckle to himself when he heard Red-eye roar out “That was for leaving my gun laying there!” in response, his voice echoing across the fields. Vez huffed, gesturing “You wasted good stimmix!” at the stained flowers. He chuckled again, and cut in with “You grimaced at every sip,” before taking one himself.

“Th-that don’t mean I didn’t like it!” Vez blustered, “Just went down a little hard is all.”

He nodded condescendingly, and were he able to, he would’ve put on a patronizing smile too, as if to say “Sure you liked it.”

Another sip while Vezkig climbed into the storage space to retrieve a bottle of stimmix he actually did like, orange in colour and mostly transparent. He heard and felt the lilac-armed gunman’s steps approaching, but what surprised him when he approached was that he seemed to be… In good spirits? His usual intensity and unbreakable stares were still there, but he stopped in front of Armless for a moment before moving on to take a seat at the other end of the rover’s doorway, leaving plenty of room for Vezkig.

“That massacre back there. That’s what I was buying time for?” he rumbled, his tone entirely neutral.

Armless simply nodded and took another sip. The warrior huffed, somberly stating that “It was a mercy-killing. They would have died a thousand deaths if the Ecclesiarch’s seed was left to fester without battle to sate it. This, the Word-bearer doesn’t know.”

Vez peeked up from storage at the sound of Red-eye’s voice, listening in, then ducked back in to grab a few bottled for him. His consideration was rewarded with a rumble of “No more yellow.” before he could even ask.

Vezkig cackled, the memory of his toadlike counterpart pouring bottle after bottle of yellow stimmix down the warrior’s throat still fresh in his mind.

Soon, he jumped back down into the main passenger space, walking over to his previous spot and placing a pair of bottles next to Red-eye with “There ya go, see how that does ya.”

One was the same pinkish colour that Armless preferred, while the other was dark blue. He cracked his own bottle and glugged down a third of it in one go. Red-eye continued staring ahead, his gun in his lap, while he opened and took a sip from the pink one. He stopped for a moment, looked at it, and took another sip. His review of the variety was “Painfully sweet, but I can see why you would like it. It is said the many-limbed ones prefer sweet flavors.”

He said the second sentence with an exaggerated emphasis, in mockery of the way he spoke during his time as a Truthseeker. 

“Fuck off Goldeneye,” the Word-bearer croaked in his sleep, eliciting a chuckle from Armless, a cackle from Vezkig, and a forceful exhalation from Red-eye.

They sat there like that, drinking and looking out across the fields, for a few minutes before Red-eye spoke up again. “I spoke to Rika, at the edge of that crater,” he rumbled.

It elicited a worried look from Vezkig, who was fully aware that while she wouldn’t hurt him, she had no such restraint towards Red-eye. He continued, stating that “We came to an agreement on one matter, at least. Those unfortunate souls praying in the crater are free, now. They will come after you, like I did.”

Red-eye looked up, directly facing the skull-faced idol that he once despised.

“With me at your side, they will not challenge you for the right of having them become part of your clan. We agreed that it would be best to deal with them as soon as possible, so I used the way rainbloom changes colour to write directions towards the depot.”

Another sip, and a hopeful huff from Red-eye. 

“With a bit of luck they’ll use the opportunity to heal their wounds instead of suicidally pursuing you across the desert the way I did.”