Three weeks later, and Sylia had mostly settled in. Sitting back in her chair, overlooking Steel Canyon below, she wondered if it had been almost too easy how the contact she’d spoken with had believed her story.
***
Walking into the police station in full armor and asking to speak to an authority hadn’t gotten quite the shocked reaction Sylia had expected. Instead the police had led her to a meeting room (an actual one, not an interrogation room with double-sided mirrors). Within a few minutes, a sharply dressed woman with dark maroon hair and visibly pointed ears stepped into the room and sat down opposite her.
“Hello, my name’s Ifrit,” she said. “I’m here representing the Federal Bureau of Super-powered Affairs. While I’m not officially an employee, I tend to serve as a kind of liason in cases like yours where direct government intervention might seem… alarming.”
“I see,” Sylia said. “I’m sure the police have forwarded on my statement…”
“They have, though, off the record, odds are it won’t go anywhere,” Ifrit said. “Crey Industries has a lot of practice at covering their legal tracks. Odds are the lab you were in may not even exist anymore.”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Sylia mused. At Ifrit’s curious expression, Sylia considered. “So… off the record, if I said that I think I’m not originally from this version of Earth, what would the likely response be?”
“That I’ve met at least six people with similar stories this week,” Ifrit said. “Cross-dimensional travel got proven years back. There’s some scientific arguments over whether the fact we keep popping holes into other realities for science has increased the uptick in similar travellers ending up in ours, but it’s science, not science fiction.”
Sylia blinked at the response, before leaning forward. “...I see. You’re right that dealing with your government directly wouldn’t be something I’d want to do without...research first. But… I need to start somewhere.”
She took out a pen and wrote down a series of numbers. “I’ve been able to access the local cell grid and this should reach me if you need… for the moment though, I think I’ll stay under notice.”
“Despite walking into a police station in broad daylight?” Ifrit asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I have some experience with that,” Sylia said, standing up as her suit vanished from sight.
***
Since then, Sylia had kept in contact with Ifrit. A bit of paperwork had her ‘legally’ sanctioned as what the locals here called a “hero”. In a way, it’d pleased a 10-year old Sylia to see how this world’s legal system apparently favored “heroes of justice”, but the current Sylia saw some all-too-familiar things in the research she’d done on the Crey Corporation. Some of the financial data she’d pulled from Crey’s databanks had provided her a nice nest egg of completely untraceable funds to get herself set up, and so Sylia had been able to set up the Silky Doll as a front for her equipment and home again, even as she considered her next move.
Ifrit had kept up contact over time, and while Sylia couldn’t prove the other woman wasn’t passing every word to her government masters, what she’d told her of her past would hardly matter. Everything she’d looked up on her own backed Ifrit’s assertion she was in another world.
And that was before the mission into the earthquake damaged neighborhood known as the Hollows.
Seeing Priss’s face, albeit not the Priss she knew (if she’d ever really known her, given Sylia’s own experiences) had been a shock, but Sylia had kept the recognition to herself. Alternate realities meant they’d never met...and so she’d simply stuck to ensuring that this Priss would be safe, regardless of what the mutant Trolls she’d fought had tried to do to her.
Afterwards, the young woman had asked for her number to thank her. Sylia wasn’t sure why she’d given it to a stranger that only looked like the one she knew, but there it was. The second contact on her comms list.
A text a day later had included a self-taken shot of Priss stepping out of the hospital, as well as a later one showing off the frankly considerable muscle that the impromptu Superdyne bath had given the young woman. Ifrit’s follow-up had explained that while the Troll mutations were typically the result of overdosing in the drug, Priss had apparently had a genetic quirk that allowed her system to process it more cleanly, resulting in the physical enhancement that better cut versions of the chemical provided its manufacturers in the local drug cartels, parceled out to their personal enforcers.
The more things change…
The operation that Ifrit had contacted her for help with this time had been supporting some young heroes in another hazard zone damaged by earthquakes, this time apparently called Faultline. The number of urban areas still rebuilding after earthquake related disasters was almost starting to feel nostalgic.
“Fliers inbound at the left!” Sylia barked, the young blue-haired girl she was working with turning to blast energy from her hands that tore apart the rust-ridden Clockwork helicopter that had been coming in. Several more small humanoid machins crawled out of crevasses nearby, their electrical discharges sparking off Sylia’s shields before she dashed in on thrusters, bladework quickly removing limbs and heads to render them inoperative, though Sylia noted that the arms continued moving for a moment even after being removed before finally stopping.
“Got ‘em!” Fusionette cheered, even as Sylia turned and saw a large segment of what she’d thought was twisted rebar start to move.
“There’s another on-!” she started to say as the larger construct charged out of the rubble at the young hero. She wouldn’t react in time as a fist the size of an engine block swung out at her, so Sylia simply leaped, grabbing the smaller girl and twisting so that the blow impacted on her back. She felt the shields blunt some of the impact, but an acidic tang in her suit’s airflow along with blinking red damage monitors suggested that hadn’t completely stopped the damage, even as her suits compensators kept her from having her considerable armored weight land on the girl under her. They landed with Fusionette on her back and Sylia over her, her armor between them and the large Clockwork, but staying like that wouldn’t be a good plan. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Owwie~” the blue haired girl said eloquently, before looking up at her, then at the Clockwork. “Oh crap, I didn’t even see that,” she said, before wriggling an arm loose and firing another blast that punted the machine back a few dozen feet.
Their immediate peril resolved, Sylia rolled off of her and got to her feet, helping her young partner up as the Clockwork pulled itself out of the rubble. “So, ready to go again?”
“Yeah, let’s leave this thing seeing stars this time!” Fusionette said, and despite herself, Sylia smiled at the girl’s enthusiasm behind her helmet.
The larger Clockwork’s hand raised and crackling ionization fired out, splashing off Sylia’s shields as she charged forward. Her main thrusters were out for full flight from the damage readouts, but Sylia hadn’t relied purely on that to fight, ducking under another swinging engine block to slice upward, hitting where relatively spindly joint connected the arm to the main body.
“He-he-hE-HE-rOes threaten! De-DE-dE-St-ROY!” the creature said, its words sounding like some kind of warbling grind of gears that Sylia could hear clearly despite it not having any kind of visible speakers that she could see. “Ne-VER hUrT aGAiN!”
Some part of Sylia’s mind wondered, for a moment, if the creature was actually intelligent, but then another rust-spiked fist came down and she decided that even if it was, the thing had come at them with no provocation she could tell, and self defense trumped an ethical investigation for the moment. Ducking down, she slid beneath the strike, her blades flashing out to slice through a kneecap, causing the machine to stumble as it turned to look at her. “Now!”
The Clockwork barely had time to pivot to look at her before bright blue-white energy punched a hole the size of a laundry basket directly through its torso. A second blast took off the tin-pot head and a third blew apart the weapon arm threatening Sylia as the momentum knocked the thing back to shatter apart.
“Like that?!” Fusionette called out from her spot, and Sylia simply flashed her a thumbs up as she stood back up, before blinking as she saw inside the broken crevasse of the machine’s chest that smaller parts were beginning to pull themselves together into tiny machines, replicas of the larger ones they’d fought earlier.
“Parts of it are still going! Keep up the fire!” Sylia ordered, backing up as Fusionette’s energy blasts carpet-bombed the Clockwork’s corpse. Soon, there was nothing but literally red-hot molten slag where the thing had been, but as far as Sylia could tell, none of it was trying to turn homicidal again.
Probably.
Putting a tag on the local police net for the PPD to take a look at the remains, Sylia walked over to where Fusionette was waiting, the young hero having a big grin on her face.
“That was great! You’re, like, really amazing at this mentoring thing, Silicon!” she said, practically bouncing (despite hovering in mid-air). “That went a lot smoother than some of my solo patrols!”
“Well, eventually you’ll build up the experience to handle it on your own,” Sylia said. “Your powers do a lot more damage than my suit does. You just need to work on your situational awareness so they can’t blindside you like that one almost did. But good instincts with pushing it back. That got us time to recover so it couldn’t attack us while we were both on the ground.”
Fusionette nodded, and despite the somewhat air-headed image that some might take from her behavior, Sylia was fairly certain she was filing that away for future use.
Sparking noises reminded her of other problems, though, as she glanced over her shoulder at the smashed wreck where the Clockwork’s fist had hit directly dead center in her wingpack’s mass, turning the thruster nozzles into so much scrap. “However, I think I’ll have to walk you home instead of flying.”
A thankfully uneventful stroll later, and Sylia saw Fusionette off to the more rebuilt section of Faultline, a young man in a leather jacket meeting them there, who Sylia took to be the boyfriend by the fact Fusionette literally hovered up to eye level to kiss him when he got there. Seeing the two youngsters off, she walked further down the street, heading into Faultline’s cafe district as she waited for her car’s auto-driver to navigate Paragon’s traffic and get there with a storage rack for her hardsuit.
It was as she was clambering out of the suit and letting the trunk mechanisms retract it inward that someone spoke up nearby. Being from literally another world, Sylia admitted to herself she hadn’t been paying as close attention to hiding her face recently, but as she turned, the voice repeated what it’d said before.
“Sylia?”
And then Sylia’s world turned upside down as she found herself face to face with a long-haired man with dark glasses and a bushy mustache, who looked for all the world like he’d seen a ghost.
Perhaps it was fitting, because Sylia certainly felt like she had.
“...father?” she said, half on reflex, before the older man took two more steps and simply embraced her tightly. Any thoughts on what turn of events had brought the dead back to her life vanished from Sylia’s mind for the moment, as she simply hugged her father, before the embrace ended, and he stepped back to look at her.
“You’re...bigger,” he managed, and Sylia could tell from the tears in his eyes that his command of entirely rational thought was probably about as solid as her own was right now. Which was to say, about as solid as the other half of Faultline.
“I… that’s a long story,” she said. “...would you like to get some coffee?”
“More than anything,” her father replied.
***
“I assumed some kind of dimensional traveller when I saw you,” Katsuhito said, sipping at his mug. “I haven’t done anything important enough to waste resources on a robotic duplicate or clone of my dead daughter in order to get closer to me, and my security clearance has been out of date since just after the war.”
“...I suppose it’s a sore topic, but given the circumstances, you can understand my interest,” Sylia said. “Your...dead daughter?”
Katsuhito nodded, having regained some of the stoicism that she remembered from her own father as he looked at her. “...I was assigned to a think tank during the Rikti War. Designing new ways to fight back after Baumtown was leveled. They kept us fairly well locked up to prevent Rikti attack, but…” he trailed off, before taking a deep breath. “..one day I got a call. A Rikti incursion had taken out a skyscraper in Steel Canyon. The heroes had limited it to just the one building, which was remarkable given how densely packed that area is, but… you, your mother, your brother… all of you were gone. The bomb that had hit the building took out four entire floors, including our home,” he said. A grimace of pain went over his features before he looked up at her. “I threw myself into my work...but after the war ended… they offered me a Vanguard commission, but helping to fight more Rikti wouldn’t have brought any of you back. I retired… a lot of us did, after that.”
Sylia nodded. “I can understand that. In my world… you were the inventor of the prototype of a technology that would literally revolutionize the world… and men from the largest corporation on the planet felt that could be profitable. Mother held on while we were young, but… she never really recovered from losing you. Meanwhile, I found a recording you left for me...with the details of the assassination, specifications of other projects you were working on… when I was old enough, I began to take the fight to them. First out of revenge...then to try to protect those who had no one else to protect them from GENOM’s greed.”
She sighed. “The real me did, anyway. As best I can tell from things that happened after I arrived here… I’m not that Sylia Stingray. I’m...a clone, or a robot duplicate of some kind, in a manner of speaking,” she said with a slightly wry smile. “The distinction with the biotechnical details of a 33-S series Buma is mostly academic. But I have her memories… I was possibly going to be some kind of plant or replacement to get at her, before someone stole me away to here and activated me.”
Katsuhito looked thoughtful, examining her with a more critical eye than he had before. “That’s… fascinating, if you don’t mind my saying. I’ve had access to the Nemesis automatons before, and they’re remarkably life-like, but if you get down to it, there’s still the machine at some level, and there’s… tics and tells that show that they are, if you’re a careful enough observer. You don’t have any of those. I assume you need some kind of upkeep?”
“Food seems to keep me fueled. And sleep,” Sylia said. “Not as much as a normal human, but it’s worked so far… but I don’t really… know, exactly. I haven’t seen more than a glance at my own specifications.”
“...I could help,” Katsuhito said. “I mean, it would take some lengthy study, working from scratch, but… “ he said, before giving her a shrug and a slightly wistful smile. “It’s the least I can do as your father,” he said, answering the question Sylia’d been too afraid to ask the entire conversation. “...if that’s okay with you?”
Sylia smiled, and dabbed at her own eyes a little. “More than anything.”
****
Editor's note: Ch-ch-ch-changes!
***
Walking into the police station in full armor and asking to speak to an authority hadn’t gotten quite the shocked reaction Sylia had expected. Instead the police had led her to a meeting room (an actual one, not an interrogation room with double-sided mirrors). Within a few minutes, a sharply dressed woman with dark maroon hair and visibly pointed ears stepped into the room and sat down opposite her.
“Hello, my name’s Ifrit,” she said. “I’m here representing the Federal Bureau of Super-powered Affairs. While I’m not officially an employee, I tend to serve as a kind of liason in cases like yours where direct government intervention might seem… alarming.”
“I see,” Sylia said. “I’m sure the police have forwarded on my statement…”
“They have, though, off the record, odds are it won’t go anywhere,” Ifrit said. “Crey Industries has a lot of practice at covering their legal tracks. Odds are the lab you were in may not even exist anymore.”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Sylia mused. At Ifrit’s curious expression, Sylia considered. “So… off the record, if I said that I think I’m not originally from this version of Earth, what would the likely response be?”
“That I’ve met at least six people with similar stories this week,” Ifrit said. “Cross-dimensional travel got proven years back. There’s some scientific arguments over whether the fact we keep popping holes into other realities for science has increased the uptick in similar travellers ending up in ours, but it’s science, not science fiction.”
Sylia blinked at the response, before leaning forward. “...I see. You’re right that dealing with your government directly wouldn’t be something I’d want to do without...research first. But… I need to start somewhere.”
She took out a pen and wrote down a series of numbers. “I’ve been able to access the local cell grid and this should reach me if you need… for the moment though, I think I’ll stay under notice.”
“Despite walking into a police station in broad daylight?” Ifrit asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I have some experience with that,” Sylia said, standing up as her suit vanished from sight.
***
Since then, Sylia had kept in contact with Ifrit. A bit of paperwork had her ‘legally’ sanctioned as what the locals here called a “hero”. In a way, it’d pleased a 10-year old Sylia to see how this world’s legal system apparently favored “heroes of justice”, but the current Sylia saw some all-too-familiar things in the research she’d done on the Crey Corporation. Some of the financial data she’d pulled from Crey’s databanks had provided her a nice nest egg of completely untraceable funds to get herself set up, and so Sylia had been able to set up the Silky Doll as a front for her equipment and home again, even as she considered her next move.
Ifrit had kept up contact over time, and while Sylia couldn’t prove the other woman wasn’t passing every word to her government masters, what she’d told her of her past would hardly matter. Everything she’d looked up on her own backed Ifrit’s assertion she was in another world.
And that was before the mission into the earthquake damaged neighborhood known as the Hollows.
Seeing Priss’s face, albeit not the Priss she knew (if she’d ever really known her, given Sylia’s own experiences) had been a shock, but Sylia had kept the recognition to herself. Alternate realities meant they’d never met...and so she’d simply stuck to ensuring that this Priss would be safe, regardless of what the mutant Trolls she’d fought had tried to do to her.
Afterwards, the young woman had asked for her number to thank her. Sylia wasn’t sure why she’d given it to a stranger that only looked like the one she knew, but there it was. The second contact on her comms list.
A text a day later had included a self-taken shot of Priss stepping out of the hospital, as well as a later one showing off the frankly considerable muscle that the impromptu Superdyne bath had given the young woman. Ifrit’s follow-up had explained that while the Troll mutations were typically the result of overdosing in the drug, Priss had apparently had a genetic quirk that allowed her system to process it more cleanly, resulting in the physical enhancement that better cut versions of the chemical provided its manufacturers in the local drug cartels, parceled out to their personal enforcers.
The more things change…
The operation that Ifrit had contacted her for help with this time had been supporting some young heroes in another hazard zone damaged by earthquakes, this time apparently called Faultline. The number of urban areas still rebuilding after earthquake related disasters was almost starting to feel nostalgic.
“Fliers inbound at the left!” Sylia barked, the young blue-haired girl she was working with turning to blast energy from her hands that tore apart the rust-ridden Clockwork helicopter that had been coming in. Several more small humanoid machins crawled out of crevasses nearby, their electrical discharges sparking off Sylia’s shields before she dashed in on thrusters, bladework quickly removing limbs and heads to render them inoperative, though Sylia noted that the arms continued moving for a moment even after being removed before finally stopping.
“Got ‘em!” Fusionette cheered, even as Sylia turned and saw a large segment of what she’d thought was twisted rebar start to move.
“There’s another on-!” she started to say as the larger construct charged out of the rubble at the young hero. She wouldn’t react in time as a fist the size of an engine block swung out at her, so Sylia simply leaped, grabbing the smaller girl and twisting so that the blow impacted on her back. She felt the shields blunt some of the impact, but an acidic tang in her suit’s airflow along with blinking red damage monitors suggested that hadn’t completely stopped the damage, even as her suits compensators kept her from having her considerable armored weight land on the girl under her. They landed with Fusionette on her back and Sylia over her, her armor between them and the large Clockwork, but staying like that wouldn’t be a good plan. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Owwie~” the blue haired girl said eloquently, before looking up at her, then at the Clockwork. “Oh crap, I didn’t even see that,” she said, before wriggling an arm loose and firing another blast that punted the machine back a few dozen feet.
Their immediate peril resolved, Sylia rolled off of her and got to her feet, helping her young partner up as the Clockwork pulled itself out of the rubble. “So, ready to go again?”
“Yeah, let’s leave this thing seeing stars this time!” Fusionette said, and despite herself, Sylia smiled at the girl’s enthusiasm behind her helmet.
The larger Clockwork’s hand raised and crackling ionization fired out, splashing off Sylia’s shields as she charged forward. Her main thrusters were out for full flight from the damage readouts, but Sylia hadn’t relied purely on that to fight, ducking under another swinging engine block to slice upward, hitting where relatively spindly joint connected the arm to the main body.
“He-he-hE-HE-rOes threaten! De-DE-dE-St-ROY!” the creature said, its words sounding like some kind of warbling grind of gears that Sylia could hear clearly despite it not having any kind of visible speakers that she could see. “Ne-VER hUrT aGAiN!”
Some part of Sylia’s mind wondered, for a moment, if the creature was actually intelligent, but then another rust-spiked fist came down and she decided that even if it was, the thing had come at them with no provocation she could tell, and self defense trumped an ethical investigation for the moment. Ducking down, she slid beneath the strike, her blades flashing out to slice through a kneecap, causing the machine to stumble as it turned to look at her. “Now!”
The Clockwork barely had time to pivot to look at her before bright blue-white energy punched a hole the size of a laundry basket directly through its torso. A second blast took off the tin-pot head and a third blew apart the weapon arm threatening Sylia as the momentum knocked the thing back to shatter apart.
“Like that?!” Fusionette called out from her spot, and Sylia simply flashed her a thumbs up as she stood back up, before blinking as she saw inside the broken crevasse of the machine’s chest that smaller parts were beginning to pull themselves together into tiny machines, replicas of the larger ones they’d fought earlier.
“Parts of it are still going! Keep up the fire!” Sylia ordered, backing up as Fusionette’s energy blasts carpet-bombed the Clockwork’s corpse. Soon, there was nothing but literally red-hot molten slag where the thing had been, but as far as Sylia could tell, none of it was trying to turn homicidal again.
Probably.
Putting a tag on the local police net for the PPD to take a look at the remains, Sylia walked over to where Fusionette was waiting, the young hero having a big grin on her face.
“That was great! You’re, like, really amazing at this mentoring thing, Silicon!” she said, practically bouncing (despite hovering in mid-air). “That went a lot smoother than some of my solo patrols!”
“Well, eventually you’ll build up the experience to handle it on your own,” Sylia said. “Your powers do a lot more damage than my suit does. You just need to work on your situational awareness so they can’t blindside you like that one almost did. But good instincts with pushing it back. That got us time to recover so it couldn’t attack us while we were both on the ground.”
Fusionette nodded, and despite the somewhat air-headed image that some might take from her behavior, Sylia was fairly certain she was filing that away for future use.
Sparking noises reminded her of other problems, though, as she glanced over her shoulder at the smashed wreck where the Clockwork’s fist had hit directly dead center in her wingpack’s mass, turning the thruster nozzles into so much scrap. “However, I think I’ll have to walk you home instead of flying.”
A thankfully uneventful stroll later, and Sylia saw Fusionette off to the more rebuilt section of Faultline, a young man in a leather jacket meeting them there, who Sylia took to be the boyfriend by the fact Fusionette literally hovered up to eye level to kiss him when he got there. Seeing the two youngsters off, she walked further down the street, heading into Faultline’s cafe district as she waited for her car’s auto-driver to navigate Paragon’s traffic and get there with a storage rack for her hardsuit.
It was as she was clambering out of the suit and letting the trunk mechanisms retract it inward that someone spoke up nearby. Being from literally another world, Sylia admitted to herself she hadn’t been paying as close attention to hiding her face recently, but as she turned, the voice repeated what it’d said before.
“Sylia?”
And then Sylia’s world turned upside down as she found herself face to face with a long-haired man with dark glasses and a bushy mustache, who looked for all the world like he’d seen a ghost.
Perhaps it was fitting, because Sylia certainly felt like she had.
“...father?” she said, half on reflex, before the older man took two more steps and simply embraced her tightly. Any thoughts on what turn of events had brought the dead back to her life vanished from Sylia’s mind for the moment, as she simply hugged her father, before the embrace ended, and he stepped back to look at her.
“You’re...bigger,” he managed, and Sylia could tell from the tears in his eyes that his command of entirely rational thought was probably about as solid as her own was right now. Which was to say, about as solid as the other half of Faultline.
“I… that’s a long story,” she said. “...would you like to get some coffee?”
“More than anything,” her father replied.
***
“I assumed some kind of dimensional traveller when I saw you,” Katsuhito said, sipping at his mug. “I haven’t done anything important enough to waste resources on a robotic duplicate or clone of my dead daughter in order to get closer to me, and my security clearance has been out of date since just after the war.”
“...I suppose it’s a sore topic, but given the circumstances, you can understand my interest,” Sylia said. “Your...dead daughter?”
Katsuhito nodded, having regained some of the stoicism that she remembered from her own father as he looked at her. “...I was assigned to a think tank during the Rikti War. Designing new ways to fight back after Baumtown was leveled. They kept us fairly well locked up to prevent Rikti attack, but…” he trailed off, before taking a deep breath. “..one day I got a call. A Rikti incursion had taken out a skyscraper in Steel Canyon. The heroes had limited it to just the one building, which was remarkable given how densely packed that area is, but… you, your mother, your brother… all of you were gone. The bomb that had hit the building took out four entire floors, including our home,” he said. A grimace of pain went over his features before he looked up at her. “I threw myself into my work...but after the war ended… they offered me a Vanguard commission, but helping to fight more Rikti wouldn’t have brought any of you back. I retired… a lot of us did, after that.”
Sylia nodded. “I can understand that. In my world… you were the inventor of the prototype of a technology that would literally revolutionize the world… and men from the largest corporation on the planet felt that could be profitable. Mother held on while we were young, but… she never really recovered from losing you. Meanwhile, I found a recording you left for me...with the details of the assassination, specifications of other projects you were working on… when I was old enough, I began to take the fight to them. First out of revenge...then to try to protect those who had no one else to protect them from GENOM’s greed.”
She sighed. “The real me did, anyway. As best I can tell from things that happened after I arrived here… I’m not that Sylia Stingray. I’m...a clone, or a robot duplicate of some kind, in a manner of speaking,” she said with a slightly wry smile. “The distinction with the biotechnical details of a 33-S series Buma is mostly academic. But I have her memories… I was possibly going to be some kind of plant or replacement to get at her, before someone stole me away to here and activated me.”
Katsuhito looked thoughtful, examining her with a more critical eye than he had before. “That’s… fascinating, if you don’t mind my saying. I’ve had access to the Nemesis automatons before, and they’re remarkably life-like, but if you get down to it, there’s still the machine at some level, and there’s… tics and tells that show that they are, if you’re a careful enough observer. You don’t have any of those. I assume you need some kind of upkeep?”
“Food seems to keep me fueled. And sleep,” Sylia said. “Not as much as a normal human, but it’s worked so far… but I don’t really… know, exactly. I haven’t seen more than a glance at my own specifications.”
“...I could help,” Katsuhito said. “I mean, it would take some lengthy study, working from scratch, but… “ he said, before giving her a shrug and a slightly wistful smile. “It’s the least I can do as your father,” he said, answering the question Sylia’d been too afraid to ask the entire conversation. “...if that’s okay with you?”
Sylia smiled, and dabbed at her own eyes a little. “More than anything.”
****
Editor's note: Ch-ch-ch-changes!