At the moment Armless crossed the precipice of Vezkig's shop, he realized much of his newfound strength had left his body. The engine of destruction grafted to his right arm had gone dormant, with no more than a faint glow and a quiet hum to prove its continued functionality. Though he didn't notice, by the time he entered the shop townspeople had already gathered on the main street. Those brave few that gathered the courage to come investigate what was going on, after that horrible scream-like noise shook the town.

Immediately after this realization hit him, he was beset by the aforementioned lizard, who was in a mixed state of barely-contained jubilation, aversion, and nervosity. The little mechanic pushed his hoverslate closer and closer to its limits as he grabbed at Armless, attempting to pull him towards the door to his workshop. He gladly went along, of course - Vezkig still owed him a left arm, after all. 

A few dozen stumbling steps later, Vezkig very assertively sat him on the metal slab in his workshop. He'd already set up the brass-colored limb in some sort of mechanized scaffold assembly sat atop the medical slate. There were nearly a dozen black, tube-like cables connected to the arm on the inside of the shoulder joint. The numerous cables wound back around through the scaffold and to a somewhat bulky portable computer, situated atop a box at the foot of the bed - the perfect height for Vez to work with it. The computer itself was rather bulky for a “portable” device, its profile harkening back to some alternate history where typewriters never fell out of fashion. Instead of a screen, it had a row of small hololenses, most of them either cracked, or obviously repaired. There was a small joystick at either side of the keyboard, labeled with pieces of paper that had long faded beyond legibility.

Once Armless was seated, Vez pressed a button on his remote and lowered himself to the ground, walking over to the computer. Following a few clickety-clackity keystrokes, the device flickered to life. It projected a somewhat disjointed hologram of the arm, while an array of data and notations filled most of the remaining “screen” space. Vez went on to spend a solid two minutes flicking the joysticks and tapping away at the keyboard, all the while his actions were reflected on the arm. He made it individually close and open its fingers, bend the elbow a few times, rotate the wrist, tilt its shoulder-plate, even perform a series of elaborate hand gestures.

Satisfied with its apparent functionality, he rolled his shoulders.

"A'ight, keep still, I'll need to get this right in one go. Decouplin' dataplugs…"

He tapped the uppermost row of keys in sequence, from left to right, and as he did, individual cables were ejected from the arm and clattered onto the metal bed, one by one, some slipping and falling to the floor with a dull thud. He pressed something on the screen of his horrible dataplug-drill-thing, and with a hiss, the thick socket it was connected to also fell off its plug.9  

“Now just keep still…”

Between occasionally jiggling the left joystick and tapping in commands, Vez used his scrap-tech computer to line the arm up with Armless' shoulder, then slowly maneuvred it into position right up against the semi-flat surface of the joint. With far more intensity than was warranted, the lizard used his thumb to flip up the top of the joystick and press a red “fire” button. 

Thunk. Whirr. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. 

Slowly, the arm connected itself to Armless' shoulder - or rather, it transmitted connection requests that Armless had to mentally approve. With the first one approved, the largest, central plug extended and connected the arm to his shoulder, then pulled it tightly onto the joint. From this point onward, the process of integrating the arm was a long series of connection requests and dataplugs moving into place. 

Armless found the whole ordeal and primitive at best, though he couldn't help but respect the ingenuity it would require to make such an antiquated piece of cyberware compatible with his own, relatively modern body. 

Vezkig found it immensely fascinating, filled with satisfaction at his creation's apparent functionality.

With the final plug in place, the arm locked itself to his shoulder and finally tapped into his body's energy and data infrastructures. A pinkish glow ran down the entire length of the limb in the gaps between plates. It vented gas through the seams around its joints as they shifted and tightened in the limb's transition to an active state.

Armless felt a jolt of sensation. His left arm was cold - not freezingly so, but rather as though it was heavily insulated to heat, and its sensors hadn't been properly tuned to compensate. 

“So? How is it?" Vezkig questioned.

Armless raised his left arm, closed his hand a few times, and then gave Vez a thumbs-up. He even smiled, somewhat. Though he had no face to smile with, the little lights that were his eyes deformed to a more cheerful shape, for but a few seconds. He could've sworn the small tinkerer let off a puff of steam with his sigh of relief. 

"That's good. You're gonna need two arms if yer gonna go butting heads with the Truthseekers."

He would've questioned Vez about why he though he'd need to go up against the group known as Truthseekers, but with a bit of thought, the answer became clear.

"I either am, or look like some sort of mythical creature to them, and I just murdered someone who was likely a high ranking member of their organization. Of course they couldn't allow the death of a member to go unpunished."

"Uh, you alright there?"

The raspy voice derailed his train of thought. Armless realized he'd been staring directly at Vezkig, and it seemed to be making him rather uncomfortable. He resolved to speak, and for once, his voicebox obeyed without a fuss.

"Sorry, I got lost in thought. Do you mind if I rest at your shop for a bit?" 

"Great. Now start speaking like a robot, won't you?" Armless scolded himself. He really hoped inappropriate voicebox malfunctions wouldn't become a pattern.

"Sure. Don't see why not. Just lemme get this junk…"

Vez got back on his hoverslate, and begun struggling to fish the remote out of his overalls. 

"Hold on, I'll do it."

Vez froze, reluctantly nodded in agreement, and stepped aside. Armless got off the bed, and hoisted the messy-looking motorized scaffold assembly off the bed and onto the hoverslate. 

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"There. Do you need help getting it to its place? It's not as if I ne-e-ed to rest. Just helps with repair and self-diagnostics. Like figuring out what's wrong with my voicebox." 

He was fully willing to help - after all, using a new piece of cyberware was the best way to master it. Nevertheless, Vez was already at the back of the room, forcing his hoverslate to lift the whole assembly onto a workbench. Between his relatively soft tone of voice, the hoverslate's incessant whirring, and Vezkig's own chaotic thoughts, the lizard didn't even notice Armless speaking.

And so, he did as he said he would. He sat down on the metal bed, made sure the Gun wouldn't fall off, and activated rest mode. His posture relaxed ever so slightly, and his eye-lights faded away. 

Armless drifted into the depths of his own mind, his body's systems processing data from his period of activity, diagnosing interactions between sub-modules and whether or not either of the new modules could synergise with non-essential systems. 

He woke up to a data interfacing request, about four hours later. The lights in his eyes blinked to life, and he turned his head to the source of the alert.

Vezkig, standing next to him, frozen in place. Staring at him. He was clutching that horrible drill-like data-tool in his arms, connected to a short extension cable, which was plugged into a bulky wrist-band placed around his left arm. Though he didn't mean to come off as such, the fact he had just come out of rest mode caused his voice to be exceptionally static-filled.

"̡͘I̛͞'͢m͠ ͟͟şo̸͡r̷ŗ̸y, ̵̢w̕҉e͝ŕe̷͘͟ ͠y̕͞o͏͢u ͘͞t̛ryin͠g̢ ţ̕o͡ ̷͘g̡a̧t̕͏h͠͏͞e̷̷͟r̸̢ da̵t́҉a ̶̵f̷̡r҉om͏ ̸̛̕my̛͜ b͢͏̵o̕d̷y̴?͏̶"

Vezkig’s eyes went wide, his frog-like pupils expanding. He froze up in place, and began trying to choke out a sentence.

“N-n-now look ‘ere, I-I-I was jus' tryin' to...”

“Note to self: Avoid giving the lizard an aneurysm," he thought before speaking.

“I don't mind. I did agree to let you do exactly that, didn't I.”

Armless mentally approved the connection request as he spoke. He could clearly see Vez relaxing with each word said, though he was visibly shaken. That horrible device let off an affirmative ding. Still slightly trembling, Vez reached for the wrist device, gently pulling it off his  arm. 

“W-well, I'll just go a-an' sift through the da-a-ata. Y'gonna go back to sleep or…?”

Ever so slowly, he shook his head. Four hours wasn't quite a full cycle for how long he'd been active, but it was enough. His muscles tightened and his body shuddered in place, taking all the time it needed to bring its subsystems online. The Gun awoke with its master, a faint pink glow now illuminating the mostly dark room. His left arm off-gassed with a hiss, fingers opening and closing. Armless sat up and got off the bed. Left Vezkig to his devices. The data he got in that short timespan wouldn't be remotely enough to build anything significant with, but… It'd provide enough insights to make him feel like he got more than his asking price. At least, that's what Armless hoped would be the case.

With slow, deliberate steps, Armless walked out of his shop and headed towards the bar. It was still the middle of the night, the night sky illuminated with a thousand-thousand stars and tiny moons. The main street was deserted, as he expected. As he approached the bar, he could hear people talking within, even some faint notes of music. But it wasn't piano, or any other physical instrument - a recording, likely being played through a similar PA system he saw at Vezkig's shop. A song he didn't remember, but sounded similar to others that were included  in the troves of cultural history and media that were sent out as part of first contact. Sung in an ancient dialect of modern cityspeak, one which used a horrendously over-complicated writing system.

From what he could tell, the lyrics spoke of a lonely way, a blue comet in the sky, of an ancient hero named Melos. That awfully slow door finally opened, and Armless stepped through. This time, he knew to avoid the squeaky floor panel, and though he got a few glances, his presence didn't seem to disturb the patrons too much. If anything, he heard a few excited whispers from the tables further back. 

And then, a suspiciously familiar tower of yellow-tattooed scaly muscle stood in his way.  A growling voice rumbled from above him. Strangely, there was no animosity in its tone.

"Come. Sit."

Rika didn't even wait for a response. In fact, she just turned around and walked towards the very same chair she nearly broke after their previous encounter, at the same table. Armless didn't exactly want to risk another confrontation, and so he did as she asked, walked over to her table, and sat down at the only free chair. It was a rickety polymer and plastic folding chair, and it creaked under his weight before he rested his gun-arm on the table.

He couldn't help but take in the appearance of the intimidating lizard-woman before him. The only way he could distinguish her from warrior caste males was the fact her scales were closer in hue to cyan than green, were pointed  in shape rather than rounded, and the shape of her skull was somewhat softer. She wasn't any smaller than her counterparts, though - larger, in fact. Whether that was due to sexual dimorphism or simply her being an outstanding specimen, that he wasn't sure.

His attention wandered, and he began observing the bar itself. Now that he was actually able to think clearly, he could take in the layout of the establishment in greater detail. It was one large, rectangular room, with an exceptionally high ceiling, a solid eight metres top to bottom if he were to guess - probably to accommodate those of the warrior caste. There was a mixture of round and rectangular tables filling the room, some wooden, some polymer and metal, some a patchwork. The bartop was just that - a bartop, with an eerily human-like lizard-man, polishing a glass mug with a surprisingly clean rag. He could tell the lizard was watching him, despite the fact that his eyes were on the mug.

“Here. Drink.”

Once more he'd become lost in his train of thought, and one more someone forced it off its rails. His eye-lights blinked. He realized that there was now a bottle filled with opaque, pinkish liquid in front of him. His left arm let off a quiet hiss as he spurred it into motion. Still not fully synced, huh?, he pondered as he carefully reached for the bottle, and as he did, he noticed two things. When did she… The bottle was already open, and she was sitting in an ever so slightly different position. When did she do that? For that matter, when did she even put the bottle there? 

A long sip. A look of confusion on her face - a furrowed brow, a puff of steamy breath from her nostrils. She questioned in a curious tone, “Lips on the inside?”

Though not aware of how his own mouth worked, he thought that simply showing her would be enough. With a nod, he set the half-empty bottle down and opened his mouth wide, displaying the outlandish, milky-white flesh inside. His mouth was not entirely unlike a normal human's - some parts were missing, some parts were different, some new parts were present. No tonsils, no uvula, a tapered tongue in place of a normal one. Instead of saliva, some sort of runny, lavender gel. In the back of his throat, the flesh visibly mingled with metal, with something resembling some sort of grinder visible. There was a pair of fleshy ridges just behind his front teeth, seemingly present to mimic the function of lips.

A noise bordering on the edge between a growl and a dry-heave rumbled from her throat, and she spat out a single word dripping with audible disgust.

 “Enough.”

Armless closed his mouth and took another sip of that lovely, fruity nectar that the lizards seemed to regard with the same fondness one would regard biowaste. Even as he sat there, he felt the mixture of biogel and stimulants being absorbed and circulated throughout his body, kickstarting, fueling ongoing self-repair processes and refilling biogel reservoirs. Meanwhile, Rika was clearly holding back a strong, visceral sense of disgust and aversion, one entirely unfitting for someone as imposing as herself.

“You come to our town. You fulfill Vezkig's mad theories. You kill Goldeneye. Now open war with the Truthseekers is inevitable. Will you fight like a warrior, or die like a whelp? Time will tell.”

That was… Surprising, to say the least. She didn't exactly speak like someone he would consider to be at the height of civilization, but he could tell she was far from savage. One more sip. The bottle was empty. Squeeze. It crumpled in his grip, he dropped it on the table. 

“I am free.”

“They will chain you. You will be an idol. A captive icon of worship.”

“Then they will burn.”