“Time will tell. Tonight we drink. Tomorrow we prepare.”

Armless nodded. Rika gestured at the bartender with two fingers outstretched. He almost missed it, but this time, Armless could see what was happening. The bartender threw two bottles of stimulant in close sequence at Rika, her tattoos lit up, and she caught them faster than any human eye could see. Somehow, the incredibly quick motion didn't cause any extraordinary air displacement, as though instead of literally moving faster, she was accelerating herself in the flow of time.

One bottle was filled with the now-familiar opaque pink and round in shape, which she put down and rolled towards him. The other was much larger, rectangular in shape, and contained bitter-smelling, translucent green liquid. He could tell even from across the table, so noticeable was the aroma when she unscrewed the cap. To be perfectly fair, she didn't complain about the smell when he opened his own drink, despite the grimace she made.

A smaller sip, this time. He wasn't in desperate need of biogel anymore, and so he was drinking for enjoyment more than to refill his reservoirs. Rika pointed at his left arm.

“Can you feel with it?”

He nodded, taking another sip of his drink. The bottle felt pleasantly cold against his metal skin, despite the fact heat sensations were still dulled considerably.

“Touch, yes. Temperature is dull.”

This time, Rika nodded.

“Vezkig made it that way. Said it could withstand dragonfire. The others chased him out of the bar. Nobody trusts blacktech.”

“Why?”

“The cursed light. It rages inside the machines. Burns away at our gifts. Some never recover. Vezkig will never fly under his own strength again.”

“Gifts? Is that what you call…”

A gesture with the bottle towards her tattoos. A strangely somber nod of affirmation.

“We... Bend the worldly laws. The cursed light enforces them without quarter.”

The pieces necessary to form a revelation fell into place. “They're a species of natural reality-warpers. Of course they'd be scared of void energy.”

“Now I understand.”

She shook her head ever so slightly. “No, you do not. But one day you might. And I might understand you.”

“What do you mean?" Armless questioned, tilting his head.

Another steamy exhalation. “You are not of my clan. Not of my caste. Not of my kind. You are not man. Not machine. Something in-between.”

“Like Vezkig.”

She shook her head again, more forcefully this time. “No. Vezkig was broken. Repaired himself with machine. You are of the many-limbed ones. You change yourselves when it is not necessary. This is unheard of to our kind. Many who were changed think of themselves as abominations. Yet here you are. I see your body. I cannot help but be disgusted, but also fascinated.”

Armless took a long sip of his drink, then let out a synthesized chuckle.

“Thanks for the compliment.”

At first, he thought he'd upset her when he heard Rika make a rumbling noise. Then, he realized she was laughing. She gestured for the bartender to throw her another pair of bottles, and set them down in the middle of the table.

“Tonight, we drink.”

Armless nodded.

“Tonight we drink.”

----------------------------------------

When he came to, he found himself still in the bar, sat at the same table, only… Something was off. Perhaps it was the several dozen pink bottles on the table, meticulously arranged into three rows. Or perhaps it could have been the fact that Rika was gone. It could have been that the front door was stuck open. Or maybe, just maybe, it was the fact there was a paper note stuck to his right arm.

With the hissing of escaping gas, he spurred his left arm to life and grabbed the note.

It had “Today we prepare. Come to the southern gate.” written in blocky, rough letters, using some sort of ink. He noticed there were depressions in the paper as if someone had written on the other side as well. Sure enough, when he flipped the note it had another note in much smaller, cleaner writing, though still in the same black ink. "Come to my shop. Ask about Apeiron. - Vezkig”

Armless synthesized a vocalization emulating the sound of a groan, and stood up. He could feel that all of his biogel reservoirs were full, that his body was nearly at peak performance. At least, as good as his self-repair subroutines could make it. While all the organic parts could be re-grown, and vital synthetic components were built to be fully reconstructible by the self-repair system, his body still had parts that had to be repaired or replaced the old fashion way. Then, there were the disposables. Redundant. Secondary. Even entirely cosmetic. His skin was one of the latter, and it appeared his body had deemed it too damaged to salvage. When he stood up, it was left behind on the chair in one piece, ripped open from the inside out. A milky-white hide that would never rot, merely atrophy over the course of decades.

He glanced at the row of bottles one last time before heading out, and noticed that one was still mostly full. Not wanting good stimmix to go to waste, he put the cap back on and took it with him as he exited the bar.

It was… Early in the morning. Very early in the morning. He couldn't see the sun, which meant it was low enough that even the town's relatively small buildings obscured it. It was still pleasantly cold. As the note requested he headed to Vezkig's shop, and the moment he stepped near the door, it slid open. The lizard was waiting for him, standing on the countertop with his remote in hand. Vez beckoned him inside and closed the door behind him, then led him to the workshop in the back. There was a solid slab of something set up at the back of the room. It was sitting atop Vezkig's hover-slate, the device quiet and inactive. Vez clambered up onto the workbench immediately opposite the medical slate, and started peeling back layer after layer of paper. “What was this about “Apeiron” you wanted to tell me?" Armless questioned.

Vezkig kept on pulling papers off the wall, meticulously ordering them into piles on the workbench even in his state of frantic exhilaration. “When you fought Goldeneye, the gun wouldn't fire properly, right? It took ya the whole fight to build up enough power to make it fire even one proper shot, and goin' by the noise, a whole lot of that energy was wasted.”

He hesitated for a moment before responding. “...Yes.”

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Armless didn't know why it took the weapon so long to synchronize to his system, but he viewed it as a failure on his part. He must've overlooked something, or perhaps rushed a bootup sequence. "Maybe…"

“S-see, that's 'cause you were tryin' to control it like you'd do with any other machine-limb, even the Aegis that is your left arm. But it ain't like that. Now, I can't prove this, but when I first got my hands on that thing, I fell into a trance o' sorts when I touched the power source. Woke up to a big ol' pile o' notes and my hands all inked up. Most of it was gibberish, but one page…” At last, he triumphantly pulled a tattered, dusty page from the layers of paper plastered above the workbench. A mad glimmer in his eye, the tinkerer handed it over to Armless. Though he couldn't remember who he was before all this, the manic, scribbled symbols that covered the paper spoke to him on a primeval level. It was as though the nonsensical hieroglyphs conveyed the purest form of a given concept, rather than being abstract symbols representing an interpretation of it.

Parent-creation Azoth.

Creation-origin human.

Alive-metal heart.

Partial-mind.

True-name Apeiron.

“...made a lil' more sense than the others. I still can't tell what most of it says, but I could make out that the gun's got a name, and that name is Apeiron. Maybe it'll work as some sort of access code to make it work properly," Vezkig went on speculating. His eyes, filled with the glimmering of excitement and hope as he stared Armless in the eye. “Can't hurt to try, right?”

It wasn't as if he had a reason not to. The gun - Apeiron - was his best option for weaponry, even if it couldn't fire properly in most cases. Armless nodded in affirmation, and the lights in his eyes blinked out as he faded into the depths of his own mind, for but a moment.

“Initiate diagnostics mode for module 78a. State manufacturer designation," he said in his mind.

A purely robotic, high-pitched version of his own voice chimed inside his head. “Akaso Industries Zero-Emission Series Prototype. Sub-Designation: Self-contained All-purpose Void Energy Reprocessor Type-78a. Codename: [CLASSIFIED]. Please confirm codename to access diagnostics.”

“Product codename: [Apeiron]. Confirm.”

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. An affirmative ping sounded in his head. Seven seconds before the system responded. His robotic self chimed again. “Authentication confirmed. Access granted. Initiating full integration, stage one.” He pulled himself back into reality, and the workshop flickered into view. He caught Vezkig staring into his, just before the lizard noticed his eye-lights coming back on and scuttled away to a less creepy distance, trying to clamber back up to his perch atop his workbench. Apeiron felt… Different. The weight, shape, appearance, it was all the same. But something inside the gun was awake. Something inside that unfinished engine of destruction had just woken up, and it wanted to stretch.

Armless did his very best to sound as neutral as possible, he even tried to not stare directly at the lizard, instead looking at that hunk of super-plastic at the back of the workshop. “Vezkig, you set up that hunk of polymer as a target, am I correct?”

Vezkig finished seating himself on the edge of the workbench, nodding as he vented steam and tried to catch his breath. “Y-yes, fo-or the gun. The militia's hoggin' all the practice targets so I had to make do. Go ahead an' blow it apart, that's what I hoped you'd do anyway.”

Armless raised his right arm and aimed it at the slab. With little more than a thought, it sprung to life. A lavender glow built up within its barrel. The robotic voice chimed in his mind. “Please confirm projection parameters: Stability, Polarity, Subtype. Awaiting further instruction.”

He didn't quite understand what it meant, but it couldn't be too difficult to figure out. “Stable. Positive polarity. Single pulse," he commanded. The whining noise coming from the gun intensified, but remained bearable. The light faded to black, as though whatever energy built up within had imploded. And then… A lavender-colored pulse of unworldly energy burst across the room.

Then, there was a circular hole a little over a meter across, blasted through the slab - and only the slab. “Apeiron, low power," he thought. With that thought, the gun fell silent, its glow fading.

It was then that he noticed Vezkig wildly gesturing at him from his perch, seemingly beckoning him to turn around. He did, and was faced with a small crowd of townsfolk.

The murmurs were far from displeased - if it could even be considered murmuring. More like unintelligible whispering, given that the crowd was barely big enough to be considered one. Two of the builder caste, one of which could almost pass for an eccentric human with the correct outfit. One of the builder caste, wearing a tattered, bright green hi-vis jumpsuit, with the top half allowed to hang down like an apron, and a missing eye. What looked like a builder-caste child, barely a meter tall, hiding behind the almost-human lizard. And the fourth, standing at the back and towering over the rest… Rika. Śtaring. Not at Armless, surprisingly enough - rather, she was staring at the man-sized, rectangular donut of super-plastic behind him. Her gaze shifted to Armless, and she nodded. “Ready?" rumbled the draconian amazon over her compatriots.

He nodded in response, his head held high. Was it because he had to tilt his head up to look her in the eye, or was it some sort of emotion building in that metal skull of his? At that moment, only Armless knew. Rika turned and began to make her way back out of the store, the crowd following in her footsteps with a surprising level of coordination and discipline. The only straggler was the hi-vis builder, and even then, only for a moment. Only for a moment did he glance at Armless, then at Vezkig. A bitter, toothy grin. Spiteful respect in his chainsmoker-esque voice. “You win. Fake or not, at least this one works.” With those words, he was gone, and Vezkig was frozen in place, stunned. “A fake?" Armless thought to himself.

It was only when Armless finally took a step to follow after Rika that he finally snapped out of that state. “Hol' on, you just stay right there!" he said as he frantically leapt to the floor and ran over to one of the benches at the back of his workshop, covered in clutter and tools, including his frankendrill-PDA. He moved some of them out of the way, and grabbed something distinctly smooth and white. The object's true nature came to light when Vez climbed back up to his original perch and held out the mask for Armless to take.

It fit his face perfectly, and so it couldn't have been based on a reconstruction of the mask he was wearing when he first walked through that town gate. It even locked into place correctly, the inside molded exactly to the shape of his skull. “Wait, was… Was this why you were pulling data from my system? To make me a new mask?”

Vezkig nodded. “They'll think you're a fake, underestimate ya, like Goldeneye did. Even if one of his bodyguards somehow got a picture o' your face, they's a fanatical bunch, they won't believe 'til they see the real thing in action. By then it'll be too late for 'em. Now go, the raiding party should get here in less than half an hour.” He hopped off the workbench, and started walking towards the back of his workshop.

And so, Armless left the scraptech shop behind once more, his face obscured by that replica mask. The main street was, as before, practically deserted - not because the townsfolk were hiding in their homes, however. It was because all capable men, women, and children were gathered in equal numbers at both town gates. He made his way to the southern gate, and was met with stares and murmuring. Looking around, he assessed the situation.

To the left of the gate, the townsfolk had set up a makeshift shooting range, for the young and inexperienced to practice marksmanship. Most of the trainees had low-caliber slug-throwers similar to those wielded by Goldeneye's bodyguards. A smaller, but still significant number of them wielded some sort of directed energy pulse weapon. A single one had… A revolver marked with a familiar logo. Unlike his compatriots, the adolescent warrior-caste lizard had no tattoos, and even though he was busy drinking watered-down stimmix, Armless could easily tell what the gun did to its targets.

The practice target - a smaller slab of polymer with a crude representation of a lizard-man painted on it - had a number of thin, metal quills poking out of the front, but had been completely ripped apart at the back, a mass of jagged edges stretching it apart from the inside out. A standard mass-reactive livingmetal graviton accelerator, then. The lad would do well, Armless felt it in his exoskeleton.

The other townsfolk were all armed in some way. Slug-throwers. Pulsed energy projectors. He even saw a few guns resembling cobbled-together graviton accelerators and plasma-throwers. They were all so different, but all so similar. Builders, Thinkers, Warriors. Different sub-types of people in a greater whole. A thought passed through his mind, spurred on by a fragment of memory. “They're not all that different from what we were like, only two millennia ago.” What a strange memory.

“Town elder says you're giving the pre-battle speech before the raiders get here. He will try negotiating with them by radio," Rika's voice rumbled from his right. Armless nodded. “Very well.” She rumbled once more, this time much, much louder. At the thundering noise that was her voice, the crowd fell silent.

“OI, LISTEN UP! THE ELDER SAYS THE HUMAN WILL GIVE THE BATTLE-SPEECH THIS DAY. ANY OBJECTIONS?”