Scene #2286: Iron Maidens

Owner	Pose
Septette Arcubielle	Septette paces back and forth in the holographic arena she designed for their encounter. It's rather nondescript- a simple circular arena, roughly a hundred meters in diameter, with a textured floor made of a reinforced tungsten alloy. Her claws clank noisily against the ground, and she folds her arms behind her back, hollow ribcage expanding and contracting as if in a silent sigh. Yggdroids do not feel fear. One cannot stare into the thousand eyes of the Abyssal God unflinching and have any shred of instinctive self-preservation. But anxiety is not so foreign to the little robot, and so she fidgets with her cloak, and waits.
Zwei	Truth be told, there is an ulterior motive to Zwei being here. Njorun's famous Ring of Philosophy is by invitation only, and this presents their first chance to get inside of it. Of course, they'd have obliged Septette either way, being more than fond enough of the yggdroid, but the location provides a nice bonus. The instance elevators open up, easily able to deploy both Asche and Weiss at once, due to being built for the use of giant robots on occasion. Weiss' heels tapping over the reinforced floor aren't even audible over her larger counterpart's heavy footfalls, causing the metal to reverberate with each step. The two of them stop a few dozen meters away, Weiss waving and Asche inclining his head, before the former speaks. "Sorry to keep you waiting! I wanted to grab both units so you'd have a choice of who you want to spar with. Are you looking to train against equally sized opponents, or against ones that are bigger than you?" Both of them are equally likely to come up in the multiverse after all.
Septette Arcubielle	"No need to apologize for that, Zwei," she replies cheerily, and flexes her fingers slightly as her claws seem to extend. "I'd be happy sparring against either of your units, though I rather assumed you'd be using both. I won't be holding back, so there's little reason for you to." As if to emphasize that, her blades extend and retract in quick, flickery movements, and her core's sensor presence abruptly spikes from its already-disproportionate levels- though, strangely, its temperature plummets at the same time. "Like I said earlier- this isn't so much for training as it is for fun, from my perspective. It's been far too long since I've had someone I could really push my limits with."
Kotone Yamakawa	Kotone Yamakawa has never got a chance to be in here before so much like Zwei? She was curious but likely not for the same reasons as the machine intellgience was? Was that even the right term for Zwei? She had no idea at this point. Kotone was however hanging back from the ring, given this fight could get more than a little crazy.
Zwei	Weiss is all smiles on the outside, but Zwei mentally frowns. Fighting with both units at once, while an excellent test of Septette's abilities no doubt, would be exposing a glaring, critical flaw in their early design phase; limitations that had yet to be lifted when everyone working on them had disappeared so long ago. Deploying both units at the same time against a capable opponent would immediately show off the fact that the two functionally share the same health bar, with the distributed, non-centralized computing clusters in each sharing superposition with one another. If Weiss took a bunch of damage that then reflected in Asche's loss of performance, it would be exhibiting a critical disadvantage to someone Zwei has only recently met, as much as it might like them. "Oh trust me, I wouldn't really gain much by doing that!" says Weiss, waving her hands emphatically. "These two would get in each other's way if they had to fight the same opponent! It'd really be no more advantageous to me than just using one at a time!" Smooth. "Tell you what, this arena's a little small, so we'll get in some personal scale combat training in, and then we can pick a bigger one later and see how well you fare against a higher scale of firepower~" In reality, Zwei wants to feel Septette out first. Weiss is objectively weaker than Asche, but better tuned for solo combat. A fight will give more data than simply having Asche blast the whole arena at once. To that end Asche casually leaps to the edge of the arena as if ascending a step on a staircase, sailing through the air far more easily than his mass should allow, before abruptly swivelling around in midair with a brief pulse of his thrusters to orient himself facing the arena. A loose scattering of miniscule reconnaissance drones follows in his wake, deploying into a distant web overhead to record the exercise, and more importantly, block it from the Ring's cameras with electronic interference. Weiss steps up to the fore, sleek, jet black combat armour locking onto her body piece by piece, like being disintegrated in reverse. It's remarkable for being completely and totally featureless, save for tiny points of green light visible behind the polarized faceplate, clearly driving home that its design was never meant to accommodate the need to put it on or take it off by hand. As is tradition, Weiss takes no fighting stance. Neither of Zwei's units apply any martial art that can be singled out and analyzed; a decision purposefully made. "Ready when you are!"
Septette Arcubielle	If Septette finds anything 'off' about Zwei's declining to fight her two-on-one, it doesn't show in her expression. She doesn't appear to notice the electronic warfare, either; Sept's sensors aren't the keenest, and every Yggdroid is effectively a closed system, designed never to directly interface with any other electronics. She keeps her cloak on, for some reason, and her arms stay at her sides as a trio of small, fragile drones teleport in around her: one red, one yellow, and one blue. If Zwei had any magical affinity at all, they'd be able to notice Septette using the drones like mana capacitors, charging them up for future use. To most physical scans, however, they'd appear to be harmless: no obvious weapons, or any combat systems at all other than simple thrusters used for navigation. Analyzing the transmissions between them and Septette wouldn't be any more fruitful: much like the Yggdroid herself, they don't seem to have the ability to send or recieve wireless signals at all. "I feel ready," Arcubielle chirps cheerfully as her glowing lavender eyes lock with the lights behind Zwei's faceplate. That's all the warning that she gives before her talons dig into the floor to brace and she brings up her left arm, revealing a contraption built into her forearm that Zwei just might recognize: the spike-thrower from the Progenitor recording. The armor-piercing spike takes off like a rocket, giving Weiss a fraction of a second to get out of the way as it accelerates...
Zwei	Ironically, Zwei has no way of detecting magic either. Though there's no interference aimed at Septette herself, just as she doesn't interact with the hardware of Asche's drones at all, neither can Weiss scan Septette's. The Armiger doesn't seem any more on guard than she had previously, at least not to any kind of physical inference, but her readiness is clearly visible the instant Septette's arm swings up to aim at her. The tungsten tiles at her feet explode into a backscatter of crumpled shrapnel as she launches herself forward, the floor giving out before fully absorbing the pressure generated by her legs. The spike scrapes right past the side of her helmet, casting the flicker of sparks against the faceplate. It isn't clear whether Weiss had only just barely reacted in time, or whether she had deliberately moved with the bare minimum of energy necessary to avoid being stabbed through the head. She ignores the drones for the time being, closing in on Septette herself with the rattling bang of supersonic movement, planting one foot down a meter away from her, digging in her heel, and twisting the second lunge forward into a spinning kick aimed at the yggdroid's neck. The air turns white around her foot as the vacuum wave left by its passing condenses the ambient water.
Septette Arcubielle	Septette hadn't really expected the spike to connect- by the time that Weiss dodged the projectile, it had already fulfilled its tactical purpose. The external world slows down from Sept's perspective as she allocates more attention to spatial and sensory processing, and though she can't move half as fast as her opponent, she's able to react just quickly enough to block the spinning kick with her right arm. Something inside Septette's forearm snaps on impact, drowned out by the sonic boom that reaches her ears an instant later, but the exoskeletal plating itself holds steady. As her talons dig furrows into the floor in an attempt to keep still, Sept flash-freezes the condensed moisture around Zwei's leg- and just about everything else within a small radius, as the temperature abruptly plummets to a few degrees above absolute zero. "Cocytus," she intones quietly, and the blue drone discharges its stored energy to add to the effect. The cold itself is unlikely to harm Zwei, but that's not the intent: rather, Septette's counting on making Weiss's armor more brittle. Before she's even finished her incantation, the curved blade on Sept's right arm flicks out as quickly as it can manage, aiming for the back of Weiss's knee while the ice hopefully slows their movements. Its monomolecular edge hums with a actinic glow, and she grabs her own wrist and twists her upper body to throw as much of her weight into the stroke as she can.
Zwei	Oh goddamn magic. Zwei is going to remember the colour coding on this one. If the blue drone is shooting out ice, then it stands to reason that the red and yellow ones must contribute heat and electricity, going by the three most commonly used elements in multiversal elemental magic it has encountered thusfar. Frozen solid, Weiss is forced to flex the limb past what the armour can take, shattering chunks of carbon allotrope off in a deluge of glittering pieces as she works her leg free, just in time for the scything blade to take her foot off at the ankle. There's a tiny spray of clear, iridescent fluid, but no cascading electrical arcs or outpouring of oil. Licht machinery has moved well past the need for those. Without the capacity to deliver a followup kick, Weiss wheels around with the aid of the vernier thrusters mounted on her combat exoskeleton, taking off from the floor entirely and sailing back halfway across the arena in a single rocket assisted flip. Produced in the same way as her armour, she palms a pair of handguns out of nowhere, each of which pulse once with a cascade of tiny golden lines running down their lengths in vaguely circuit-esque patterns, before immediately discharging a pair of RAISER bolts into the drones flanking Septette; rydberg photon states that simulate bullets of effectively infinite inertia. Assuming she takes them out quickly, she focuses the weapons on Septette next, sweeping her fire across her chest with rapid fire strobes of projectiles too fast for the human eye to pick out as anything but a solid line.
Septette Arcubielle	Septette allows herself a few milliseconds of exultation as she draws first blood, but that doesn't last long: she's not quite mobile enough to keep up with Weiss's retreat, and is painfully aware that her drones won't stand up to any kind of ranged attack from the Armiger. The sinister-looking guns haven't finished materializing in Weiss's hands before Sept decides to pull her mana reserves out of the fragile bots, but she fails to anticipate the sheer speed of those RAISER bolts: the magic transfer isn't even halfway over when they're shot down, wasting their remaining charge. There is one upside to the drones being shot down, from Septette's perspective: it's given her ample data on those projectiles, and bought her just enough time to adjust her tactics to fit that data. A dangerous look flashes across Sept's eyes, and her lips curl into a grin as she ducks down and bends her knees... The first two RAISER bolts strike her pseudoskeletal armor plates- or, rather, something millimeters above them. A tightly-fitted energy field flares on impact, disrupting the bolts so they sear and blacken the plates instead of simply punching through. The third bolt catches Septette squarely in the eye. Her head snaps back on impact, and an instant later the RAISER bolt explodes inside of her skull, blowing out her other optical sensor from behind and making red-hot slag trickle down from her eye sockets. Like flipping a switch, all of the electronics in Septette's body abruptly turn off: Weiss hit the components responsible for converting her core's thaumic output into electricity. The core itself is still glowing softly, but it seems to be malfunctioning: rather than the constant sensory 'noise' it usually gives off, it's broadcasting garbled and distorted data files, some of which might be just barely recoverable. The rest of Septette seems to be in much worse shape: injuries aside, she's not showing measurable activity of any kind. 'Measurable' is, of course, the key word. By Zwei's belated reaction to the drones, and total lack of response to her earlier etheric charge, Septette already figured out that her opponent isn't very good at sensing arcane activity. To any mundane instruments, the Yggdroid's body would appear completely deactivated, even as her core quietly switches over to a purely-magical operating mode. Those garbled data files she's transmitting are dredged up from her own memories, and might be quite interesting to Zwei- which is precisely the point. Anything to pique Weiss's interest, and to make her think she's already won.
Zwei	In less than a minute, Septette has achieved the highest savvy/time density of anyone Zwei has encountered in the multiverse, at the very least in matters of practical combat experience. It is used to having an enormous hardware advantage at all times, and has grown even more used to opponents who attack directly in spite of it, throwing out a few surprises here and there, but never any real semblence of a workable strategy. Maybe those kind of fights have lulled it into a sense of security here, or maybe it's simply the reflection of the massive difference in Septette's and Zwei's actual veterancy, but the Armiger seems pretty content to confirm a swift and decisive victory with a thorough scan of Septette's body on all the wavelengths available to it; that is all the non-magical ones. Zwei also doesn't really have any idea of how the Ring of Philosophy works, so while assumedly killing time until the simulation ends and Septette 'respawns', Weiss approaches the seemingly defeated yggdroid, drifting over on silent burn to see if she can peek into the busted eye socket, and to get closer to the source of the transmission in order to maximize the chance that she'll be able to get something useful out of the degraded signal. Oh it's so terribly nosy to go intercepting and reassembling those files, but no harm no foul right?
Septette Arcubielle	Beneath all that distortion, the files aren't very well encrypted. Some of them are fragments of code too short to make any sense of; others are simply too corrupted. A handful of them are surprisingly well-preserved, however, and it'd quickly become apparent to Zwei that the files are all multisensory recordings- digital memories, in fact. The recoverable files start to flicker across Zwei's mind... Nearly two centuries ago, Septette was looking up at an enormous tree, clawed hands clenched in rage- and in the present, Weiss feels those nails digging into 'her' palms, sees the light shining down between the leaves. "Is that all we meant to you? Do you think you can just- just cast us aside like this?! After all I- all WE did for you! Just because your work is done..." An odd feeling crawls up the back of Septette's throat in the memory, and her ribcage convulses as her eyes shut tight. Yggdroids can't cry, but just this once, she wishes she could. "That doesn't mean you can just LEAVE US!" She stares at the tree with fire in her eyes and acid on her tongue, as if expecting it to reply. It doesn't. It never will again. Somewhere in the distance, children and elders alike celebrate the death of the Abyssal God. Septette falls to her knees, and weeps. A new memory- an earlier one. Septette opens her eyes for the first time, and sees flashing red lights. Klaxxons blare, and she shakes her head to clear her thoughts as her initial calibrations finish. Words flash before her eyes: "RQBL-7." "Awaken, Daughter of Yggdrasil." "Stand up." "Never falter, my child." "Never fall." "The weight on your shoulders will not allow it." Obediently, she staggers to her feet, and then realizes that her armor plates are still red-hot: some parts of her chassis aren't even finished. Around her, the factory- it looks like a factory, at any rate- is in chaos; the machine that had just been fixing those plates to her skeletal frame sparks and twitches. Out of the corner of her eye, Sept catches a glimpse of a warped, hideous, pale creature: a Deep One, fresh blood on its claws and teeth. A blade folds out of the Yggdroid's forearm, and she steps forward instinctively. This is what she was made for. The time is now. In darkness, Septette's mind knits itself back together. Tendrils of magic reach out from her core and twine around her leaden limbs, and a spell blossoms on her lips. Her mundane systems are still thoroughly dead, but a single word escapes her motionless lips... The top five centimeters of flooring around Septette flash-vaporize as the air turns to plasma, and the thrusters on her legs flare as an electromagnetic field shapes the plasma flare into a jet to hurl her forwards. Those cruel blades snap out of her limbs again as she throws herself at Weiss, putting all of her momentum into a series of strikes at the Armiger's neck and torso. "HELLFIRE!"
Zwei	The content of the 'transmission' is far removed from what Weiss had expected to find. Having deteriorated to such an extent, the obvious estimate would have been dead signals to nonexistent drones, or perhaps an internal wireless link being exposed to the air after its insulating exoskeleton had broken down. The intent had been to poke around in Septette's inner mechanical workings, not the inner sanctum of her mind. Yet even after realizing what the files are, Weiss does so all the same; in fact dedicating additional resources to capturing, scrubbing and recompiling everything she can find. The fact that something would lead its own memories after being destroyed strikes her as strange, but with zero knowledge of how Septette's magical systems work, far from impossible. Besides, any damage she sustains during this exercise will disappear later, but she gets to keep the knowledge. Of course this bites her in the ass. There's no way it wouldn't. Someone with as much worldly experience as Septette is very unlikely to be far off in this kind of estimate. Weiss plays exactly to type in allocating almost all of her attention to the new task at hand, essentially putting her on a silver platter for the yggdroid's reprisal. Of course she reacts essentially instantly, but she can only accelerate her body so much at a standstill and with no contact with the ground, there isn't time to fabricate an actual melee weapon, and since Septette is one of those people that the interdiction field doesn't work on, she doesn't have any way to effectively block magically augmented cutting power of that level. As a result, the best outcome she can simulate in the tiny fraction of a second it takes Septette to reach her is to simply trade blows and go for a draw. The retrograde thrusters kick into as high of a burn as they can manage, pushing her backwards just far enough that the blade rips through three quarters of her 'ribcage', not all that much better than the alternative of being cut in half completely simply due to the enormous amount of distributed computing cut off by that much damage to a central location. Knowing that her acceleration won't outpace Septette's before she takes her head off, Weiss simply uses the split second she has to aim both guns ahead and deliberately overload them with ten times the energy they were actually meant to process, detonating them point blank in her own hands. The resulting thermal discharge is enough to slag the top layer of most of the arena instantly; enough that it would destroy her outright were it not for the fact that her active defenses work against her own attacks at least, invisibly displacing the blast wave coming in her direction before it goes any further than blowing her fingers off, though still allowed to hurl her away from ground zero to put herself out of arm's reach. She skids backwards ankle deep in molten metal until finally coming to a rest inside a shimmering haze of vapourized tungsten, shaking her mutilated hands as if having just punched something harder than she had expected, before popping her helmet off in an open sign of non-hostility. "Wow! I assumed wrong! Even out of practise, you're still /way/ sharper than anyone else I've fought! I guess it makes sense, considering how long you've lasted on your own!" Zwei calculates fifty fifty odds of a decisive victory at the very best. It's fine if Septette realizes that Weiss doesn't seem to have any especially vital areas, but it'd be an unfavourable outcome were she to see what would happen should the Armiger unit be destroyed.
Septette Arcubielle	Septette stares into Weiss's visor with her own empty sockets, her frozen expression somehow managing to convey her manic glee in the brief moment that they're locked together. Her density works against her here, slowing her acceleration and helping Weiss escape a finishing blow- and it also works against her when those guns go off, preventing Septette from evading and getting further away from the blast. Even above the noise of the RAISER guns detonating, there's an audible snap: the thin energy field flares again, then fails, followed shortly by Septette's ribcage warping and splaying backwards and her reactor core cracking ominously. As she's thrown backwards, Septette tries to find purchase with her claws, only to find that the floor's been melted as well. Finally, she stands back up, molten metal running down her legs as her electronic components turn to slag. One fragment of her core has gone dark; the other is glowing even brighter than before, seemingly straining to compensate. Her facial muscles are all but destroyed at this point, but she manages to mimic a smile nonetheless. "You flatterer," she says in a distorted, yet friendly voice. "Is it a draw, then?"
Zwei	"We'll call it that for now~ Frankly you might be a little too dangerous as a sparring partner. Normally these things go on for longer, but I see you're practising your jugular bite rather than sharpening your fangs." That part is earnest praise rather than a smokescreen for disadvantagenous odds. "Seriously! I see you going pretty far here! The usual types here have a lot of power and some practice using it, but not a whole lot of deeper understanding or strategy involving it. You're the first person I've come across who actually seems to justify their age." She'll stay quiet on the memories for now. Probably due to the tiny chance that they may have actually been accidental and Septette doesn't know that she'd seen them.
Septette Arcubielle	Septette takes a curtsy as the arena resets itself to a 'default' state, and the injuries that they've suffered disappear along with the mangled terrain. "I'm quite impressed with you as well," she answers in a more natural voice. "Your form and precision are superb, and whoever made you clearly had a subtler grasp of robotics than Yggdrasil did." She pauses for a moment, as if deciding whether to say something more... then decides to do so. "I know that you lied to me, you know," she says softly. It's not an accusing tone- merely a neutral statement of fact. "You'd have beaten me if you used Asche as well. I'm not certain why you didn't, but you are concealing something from me, are you not?" Septette shakes her head, and smiles again. "I won't pry, Zwei. But if you don't want to tell me something, please just say so."
Zwei	"Awww, now you're just flattering me~" It's nice to hear, but not the kind of compliment that Zwei takes very seriously. Very little of its personal form is self-designed, and it already has one hundred percent confidence in the kind of geniuses it took to build it to begin with. "Refinement is essentially inevitable after something exists for long enough though. It's credit to the amount of time spent by so many people to advance the state of the field to where it is now. It also helps that they were working with only one set of rules rather than that complicated dual analogue/magical system you've got going on~" Weiss' tone levels out a little at the second part however. "Probably, but beating you wasn't really the point of coming here. There's nothing riding on winning or losing, and I don't have anything to prove, so there were a lot of good reasons to try and play fairly. I'm sure you can probably think of some~" It's still a evasion of the question. "I do feel a little bad since you were willing to show off that much, but I'm the kind of person who likes to keep things under their hat until necessary. I honestly thought you'd need a lot more coaching and practise judging from the way you were talking earlier, but I don't think yours is the kind of ability that gets dull from not being used constantly."
Septette Arcubielle	Septette's eyes glimmer softly with something akin to quiet amusement as she ambles over towards Weiss. "I suppose so. The more complex a ruleset is, the more exploits there are- and yet, a more complex game is also harder to solve. ... The laws of a given universe constrain the technology of its inhabitants, like a poem's meter constrains the author. You operate within a restrictive set of laws, but your choices are all the more elegant for the restrictions they are forced to follow." The smaller robot tilts her head to the side a bit after coming to a stop a few feet in front of Weiss. "Fairness loses its meaning when applied to asymmetrical combat. Holding unequal combatants to the same set of rules is, itself, unfair- one can have parity in such a situation, or fairness, but not both." She rubs the back of her neck and glances down at the featureless floor for a moment. "If I didn't like you, Zwei, I'd have stayed dead. Each trick I reveal is one that I can't use against you: think of it as a peace offering. Besides, I learned just as much about you in the process." When Septette glances back up, there's a warm, easy smile on her face. "That said, it's not as though I've expended a finite resource. None of the tactics I used against you were premeditated, and if we were to fight again, I'd come up with a whole new set of surprises- as would you, no doubt." Sept offers Weiss her clawed hand again, with an almost sheepish expression involuntarily flickering across her face. "Even if you did go easy on me, I appreciate the fact that you came here at all. As for the memories... don't feel as though you've intruded. I'm a simple person, with little to hide from a friend."
Zwei	Weiss looks pensively at Septette, still continuing to prove herself smarter than she had initially assumed. "You only just got here and you've already figured that out, huh? I guess there's really something to be said for maturity. Excuse me! I'm still a little caught off guard at finding someone so perceptive! It's a little alarming!" She kicks one heel absently against the newly reconstructed ground. "You have a point. I apologize for not being as serious as I should have been. Next time I won't underestimate you, so prepare to be put through the grinder~" She takes Septette's hand immediately, only to pull her closer, loop one arm around the back of her neck, and rest her chin on top of her head. "The logical part of me demands that I tell you to be more careful with who you call friend so quickly, but the rest of me is just happy to hear that word~ I know you're going to refuse, but I'll still insist on showing you a little something later to make us even."
Septette Arcubielle	"Hah! I'm used to alarming people, but not for that reason," Septette replies cheerfully. "I'll take that as a compliment! Functional immortality and a perfect memory go a long way towards creating an illusion of cleverness. As for taking me seriously..." She shakes her head a little, smiling wryly. "Don't apologize for that. Being underestimated doesn't offend me- it just gives me an opening." Septette freezes in an almost humorous fashion when she's pulled into a hug. She may be intelligent, but that's not the same as being quick, and it takes a few fractions of a second for her to figure out how to respond. Those triangular metal ears tilt downwards and splay out a bit, and there's a quiet hum as a cooling fan switches on somewhere inside her ribcage. A moment later, she returns the gesture, wrapping her arms around Weiss and squeezing her gently. "Hah... Th-thank you," Sept finally replies. "I'm too curious to turn down anything you'd willingly divulge..."
Zwei	Weiss smiles to herself at feeling the smaller robot hum against her, patting the top of Septette's head as she sorts through an extremely old archive, extracts the necessary data, and compresses it down to a form that won't take too long to transfer; swiftly transferring it over to the yggdroid as if surreptitiously palming a slip of paper. The complete package will probably take around a day to fully extract, which is likely an intentional timer given the fact that it has been written into a similar format as the memories Septette herself had shared. "I've heard a lot about you and haven't told you a lot about me. If you're willing to make that effort to be friends, then it's only fair I make a similar effort in return~" She finally lets go of the yggdroid, turning around to saunter off towards the door. "If there's ever anything you need, know that you can call on me~ There aren't many people I'd go out of my way for as much as I would for you."
Septette Arcubielle	Being patted on the head is... new. Sept's ears perk up a little, and she tilts her head forwards a bit to make it easier to reach- a reflexive response that she didn't know she had. If she hadn't been expecting the file transfer, it would've gone right over her head: sending or recieving data directly is not something that Yggdroids are particularly good at, and even without the compression, various security measures ensure that it'd take a while before the file actually made it into Septette's conscious mind. Reluctantly letting go a moment after Weiss does, Septette simply stands there with her arms at her sides for a moment, wearing a slightly dazed expression. After taking yet another pause to collect herself, Sept stands up on her tiptoes and waves goodbye, smiling broadly. "L-likewise, Zwei," she calls out before Weiss reaches the elevator. "I'm always happy to chat!