Tasìa crossed another street that put her on the right path to the Quick Mart.

She had developed a strategy of how she was going to deal with the onset of lethargy as the venom wrought its defiling path through her system.

Her plan would test the boundaries of her analytics-mode abilities.

She would need a case of Ki-Jack for this endeavor, and the Quick Mart sold Ki-Jack Ginseng, All Natural Alertness Elixir in abundance.

There were a lot of things she needed to accomplish before she attempted this mission again.

Tasìa cursed herself for tackling it so unprepared. After stopping for a moment to shake off her discontent, she continued walking and mentally laying out her list of things she had to do.

She needed to take a good piss. After which she would need to hydrate.

She needed to cleanse out her system as she did with the venom in Freddie Ferenzi's tranquilizer dart less than a week before.

Poisons of unnatural means have been my trial and my tribulation of late.

If she succeeded in ridding herself of the hornet venom, she would need to follow that up with yet another good piss.

And hydrate again after that.

So she would be in fighting condition to spar in the octagon with Annebél's bots as she tested the limits of her analytics-mode in combat.

In the hope that it would provide the answer to just how much better of a fighter that the adrenaline push guided by a mentally disciplined mode of perception made her.

She wanted to know her exact specifications in performance just as an athlete in top physical condition would know that answer given the measured biofeedback built into his training regimen.

Only then would she know if she was good enough for the tasks she was given: rescuing her aunt, according to General Kutuzov, and saving the human race from abolition according to the Incubus and the Wise One.

To be honest with herself, the later task sounded absolutely silly. The Cull Spore entity algorithms were prone to drama.

So far in all her previous endeavors, she had only been winging it, and that wasn't good enough to be the agent Kutuzov and the nanospore AIs thought she could be.

Her inner voice chided at her doubts.

You're a damn good gunslinger, my girl. Like Billy the Kid, damn good gunslingers tend to be total messes in their personal lives.

That's you, baby blues. Solely mission objective focused and disciplined Tier One teams can't do what you can do even when you're just fucking around for the shits and giggles.

Tasìa scoffed at her inner voice.

Baby Blues? Our eyes are brown.

She picked up her speed in a sprint down the street, but as soon as she gained momentum, Tasìa had to stop. Her legs violently quivered.

She leaned against a pole and let loose a long, exasperated dry heave.

"Whew," she yelled.

That felt much more painful than if half-digested content actually did spew back up her throat.

She shook her head violently to shake off the nausea.

Ugh! That was awful.

She was left feeling weak and sweating again. Numb swelling arose from the bite marks the devilkin lanceros left on her body.

Whatever was in that venom flowed with an abrupt force through her in a cascade of waves. From previous research into bio-warfare, a natural subject of interest for all the residents of the Quadra, Tasìa knew what that meant.

The chemical mix that the little bastards unleashed inside her was a cyclical disrupter. Its effect on her would likely grow more intense as the compounds broke down even further in her bloodstream.

She had planned to wait until she was back at the safehouse before she took another leak so she could study her physiological reactions in a controlled environment.

However, Tasìa suspected the venom to be much more dangerous than she first assumed when she was bitten.

She needed to do something about it immediately before it had a chance to overwhelm her.

Even still, she wasn't going to let her bladder accumulate waste material through successive analytics-mode sessions without first expunging her bladder before she risked any more build up.

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It was a hard lesson she kept having to relearn in her earlier misadventures where she tried to ignore this severe physical limitation that nature had imposed upon her extraordinary abilities.

Figuring, as she tended to do, that she could just push through it all from one mad adventure to the next happenstance, and then, afterward, deal with the outcome in her free time.

On the evening Annebél drove them to Asunción that negligent thinking almost got her killed when she went into a seizure as she was pissing in a gas station bathroom.

Her limbs shaking uncontrollably, Tasìa fell helplessly off of the commode, and onto the dirty tiles of the wet floor where she went into a neurogenic shock.

Fortunately, Annebél was there. She kept a full medical kit in her Jeep to treat her brother's many medical conditions.

Annebél shot her with a dose of norepinephrine. That was the last thing Tasìa remembered occurring to her before she blacked out.

She didn't wake up again until twelve hours later in a guest's bedroom in Annebél's safe house.

Tasìa teared up a little. The brawler with her exceptional Galo-Spanish good looks was the best friend she ever had.

Gahd-dangit, don't get sentimental on me, Tasìa. We've got baddies to put in the ground.

Tasìa scanned the scene she approached. It was a lightly trafficked street with life at this time of night happening at only a biker bar, and beside it, an open-air patio built above a restaurant. Couples swung around to old folk dance patterns played on twin guitars by a duet of mariachis.

Tasìa found a pair of bushes in the narrow alley between the two buildings that would suit her present need for discreet public nudity.

Once up against the back wall, she dropped her pants and panties, squatted, and let out a vigorous stream.

The steam sizzled beneath her, but the burn stemming from her urethra, though unpleasant, was within her level of tolerance.

At least, she didn't risk dying this time.

She had aloe-treated baby wipes in her fanny pack for this very occasion. Tasìa wiped herself down and sighed at the relief she felt.

Bringing those along was the smartest thing you've done in the last two weeks, pequeña dama.

After Tasìa stood back up, she shifted over from the smaller bush a few feet to maintain her privacy before she filled up her lungs to center her breathing.

Slowly in, slowly out.

To better focus her abilities, she decided to apply the two modes, analytic and diagnostic, together.

Tasia raised her naked arms in front of her with her palms facing out.

In the morning we greet the sun, in the evening we wave to her goodbye.

Accept these gifts and more gifts will come.

Tasìa thought of Sachmilli, the elder, family friend, and father to her late, belovéd Gail-Sebastian.

He knew. All of the elders knew. You are knitted differently.

She pushed this and all other notions out of her mind until she was in the eternal present of No-Thought.

She clenched her gut and No-Thought and No-Motion came together and joined into one singular Modality.

Together, the diagnostics-mode that the Anewed called a unique meditative state of awareness, and the analytics-mode hardwired as a means of controlling the course that adrenaline flowed within her, became one entity, the Modality.

To her surprise, it could speak to her.

A beast is riding inside of you, writhing through the channels, vein and vessel; it does not belong here in this nature or any nature outside of an AI daemon's mind.

It is an evasive entity and it must be exterminated.

Cold sweat engulfed her in a frost-bit fever. Her skin grew pale and blue shapes like salamanders crawled through the skin of her forearms.

The cold vapor rose out of her pores and formed a mist that danced around her.

It tasted on her tongue like a metal from another universe. Even so, it was a taste of which she became familiar during her chemo treatments.

The chill permeated her eyes. She could feel the Modality test the nerve endings where the venom had previously latched on.

They throbbed and throbbed harder still until her vision turned white, mirroring the clear state of her mind entranced into No-Thought.

With no sense of time in the eternal present, she could only guess how much time had passed when the Modality released her with a terse statement.

It is done.

She relaxed against the wall as Tasìa decided what to do next. She needed hydration. More specifically, she needed beer.

She thought about peeking into the biker bar, to see if they were cool like the old guys from the mechanics syndicate in Villa Marron who operated a similar dive.

But what if they weren't? She wasn't in the mood for dealing with assholes.

The restaurant would be just as good a place to get a beer. Likely, they would even have a better selection to choose from. Besides, she needed to eat.

With that matter resolved, Tasia worried whether or not the hornet stings made her look unpresentable.

Easy enough to check.

While she walked up to her target, Tasìa found a tiny flashlight she kept in her fanny pack. She crouched by a mirror on one of the choppers lined up in the small parking lot in front of the biker bar.

Examining her face in the rearview mirror it was easy to see the vapor cleansing did as good a job on her outer skin as it did for her internal organs.

There was very little that remained of the stings and bites that the hornets had inflicted upon her.

Tasìa was pleased. Still, she decided to wrap her hair in a bandana. Her scalp showed a laceration. Though small, it made her feel self-conscious.

As she felt around her fanny pack for it, Tasìa froze up. She wasn't sure what made her react, but something was off. Perhaps a sound her intuition picked up on.

Her inner voice urged her:

Tasìa, you're exposed. Go and hide!

Tasia retreated to the two bushes where she had taken her tinkle.

What the hell is going on?

Goosebumps crawled up her skin as she recognized the moaning noise. It was the same cry of desperation that the Manifest gave.

She had heard it inside the Isolation Unit. She had heard it from a Manifested changeling in the IMCQ office complex.

Tasia peaked out from the side of the thistle bush as the sound became more prominent.

From up the road on the very path she just approached from the shape of a man drew closer.

He walked in the middle of the street with a swift stride in his step. The street lamps showered light on his lustrous reptilian skin.

Snakes squirmed beneath his limbs with one as vibrant as a newly inked tattoo coiled as it coolly shimmered around his neck. His face was all impossible contours and protrusions.

He lumbered towards the biker bar.

Tasìa suppressed the urge to gasp.

He's going in there looking like that?

But at the last possible moment without a pause in his step, the man's Manifested form retreated, and he was human again.

She recognized him right away due to the metal plate attached to the side of his skull.

Travis grabbed the door handle and walked inside.

Tasìa stood up, glanced around, and looked up towards the patio with the lithely gliding dancers.

Did no one else see that crazy shit?