Scene #2430: title=Between the Lines

Owner	Pose
Septette Arcubielle	Septette stands in the middle of a sterile-looking, brightly-lit room, arms folded behind her back as she combs through her own mind one last time. Maybe Ainsley really will figure out what makes the little robot tick: the further Sept digs into her own design, the less sense it seems to make. And at the center of her puzzlement is the seat of her consciousness- or, rather, the apparent lack thereof. No obvious processors; no neural analogues; no memory storage devices. She's not sure what she's hoping her fluffy acquaintance will find, and yet she can't help but feel a little nervous... Something jolts Septette from her introspective reverie, and she turns her back on the windows to glance at the grey, utilitarian teleporter pad on the other side of the room. Ainsley isn't here just yet- probably only nerves. Feeling more than a little silly, Sept pulls her lavender cloak tighter around those thin, angular shoulders, and waits.
Ainsley	Vwwwoop. Ainsley materializes on the teleport pad, which is her first experience with energy-based teleportation and pretty much the most bizarre sensation. She stands up from a kneel on the pad and looks around, disoriented by the change in perspective. And then she turns to look over at Septette blearily, blinking once, twice, thrice. "Hello~" she greets in a musical tone, stepping into the room proper. She approaches, and looks around with a distant gaze to seek out this thing Septette wanted her to look at. Since she's not super comfortable with scanning actual /people/ with her Sight, she's unlikely to assume that's what they want her to do. She looks puzzled for a few seconds, and then directs that puzzlement toward Septette. "How can I help?" she wonders, eagerly, her confusion replaced with a confident and friendly smile.
Septette Arcubielle	"Glad you could make it, Ainsley!" Septette's own voice takes on a musical quality as well- a lilting, synthesized alto. Any trace of anxiety in her demeanor has already evaporated. Ainsley's arrival seems, paradoxically, to have settled her nerves... or perhaps just given her more reason to hide them. "I didn't really want to say this over the radio, but... well, could you take a look at me?" Sept seems a little sheepish as she asks, all too aware that this isn't exactly what the feathery mage had signed up for. "I'm not really sure how my own mind works," the robot explains as she rubs the back of her neck with one clawed hand. "That is- I don't have any electronic processors. No neural structures. No memory storage devices. There's not really anyone I can ask, either- my warranty probably expired at around the same time my creator did," she cracks, "and nobody can repair me anymore if I'm a black box." There's a brief pause as Septette glances down at the floor, and her glowing eyes dim slightly as her thoughts take her elsewhere. Suddenly, they brighten again, and she snaps back to the present. "I understand if... that's not something you can do. Or something you would even want to do. But... well, I can't crack this puzzle on my own. Had to ask someone for help. You're probably not the only one who could do this... but it's safe to say I'd be less comfortable trusting anyone else to take a look at my mind."
Ainsley	Ainsley's smile remains impossibly warm and friendly even as Septette explains why she's here. The lizard girl was not expecting to run into someone who wanted this from her, not even this soon. Her eyes soon shut, and she thinks about the reasoning behind what she said and what she's asking. The nature of the robot lady and, more than that, the nature of a magic-powered consciousness. "Before I begin," she says, her hands clasping before her and her eyes remaining closed, "You must understand that once I See any part of how you function, if I can see it at all, I will not be able to... 'unsee' it. I promise to never harm or hinder you in any way and I will always endeavor to help you, but this knowledge would put you in a very vulnerable state where I am concerned. It's dangerous to know how someone else ticks, because there's always the temptation to use that knowledge." She opens her eyes, and looks at Septette very seriously. "Are you absolutely sure that you want me to do this? I have no promises that it will help you or set your worries at ease. I am willing to try, and I have hope that it would help you understand how you function, but you must be confident that this is the path you want to take."
Septette Arcubielle	Something flickers behind Septette's eyes, though the rest of her remains motionless as only a machine can. The lavender lights in her irises turn off altogether, and stay that way for a few seconds: with how quickly she processes information, she must be weighing her options very carefully indeed to require a noticeable pause for anything but effect. "I know something of what you mean," she replies softly. "And I have taken the greatest precautions to ensure that certain parts of me are quarantined for this: not merely inactive, but amputated from the rest of my psyche and discarded until further notice. That information is simply not a part of me right now." "I have few secrets," Sept continues, "but the horrors we were built to fight have left their mark on us. There are images seared into my mind of the Abyssal God's visage that could- that DID- drive those who saw them into delirium or worse, and would have shredded my sanity long ago save for the hard-coded safeguards against that very process." Finally, those lights fade back into their normal vibrant glow, dispelling the shark-like look that had crept across her empty eyes. "Whatever you'll see, Ainsley... for both our sakes, it won't be everything. If you're comfortable with that, then so am I."
Ainsley	Ainsley's smile becomes strained. Without really saying so directly, it's established that they both care about the other's well-being, to the point they focus on it. The lizard woman needs more time to process it than Septette does, more time to weigh the decision in her head with the wisdom associated with it. She unclasps her eyes and looks at Septette in the eyes for a few seconds. "Let's hope your precautions work," is all she gives in response, before her eyes flicker and manifest arcane symbols, the color blossoming out and a strange influence passing through the air to focus directly on Septette. "This may take a long time, depending on how complex you are. I cannot rush this or I risk harming myself. So... get comfortable." And so her Arcane Sight tries to discover what kind of Communication goes on within Septette's mind and being, to find the nature of that information flowing around inside of there, from point to point... To discover some sort of answer for Septette to use to put her worries to ease or, perhaps, come up with solutions for repairing her.
Septette Arcubielle	"Do be careful," Septette murmurs softly as her eyes dim again and she turns her focus inwards. "I don't get tired or uncomfortable, so please, don't rush yourself on my account." There's a pattern at the core of Sept's mind: the scaffolding around which all of her memories and traits are arranged. It's a self-modifying enchantment that manipulates mana particles much like a computer manipulating electrons; an intangible processor capable of bootstrapping itself to ever-greater capabilities in response to external stimuli. When she was first made, that pattern was a thing of pristine beauty: sprawling in its recursive complexity, but spare and elegant nonetheless. That was two and a half centuries ago- two and a half centuries of constant wakefulness, constant learning and stimulation, and constant self-improvement. Septette has never forgotten a second of her life, and it shows: now her mind resembles nothing so much as a fractal patch of kudzu. A human brain will trim unused connections, but Septette doesn't seem to; new additions simply build on the old, ad infinitum.
Ainsley	Ainsley doesn't try to take it all in at once, and more tries to scan for the parts that'll allow her to better process this. She takes in the basal Name of the network, the way it communicates coming to her, prompting a soft murmured spell to help clarify it in her sight, using information pulled from Septette to craft improvised spoken spells for herself just to continue the examination. She continues like this, and if Septette is still, it could go on for an hour or two, until the lizard girl's eyes are strained and her magic is almost overworked. Then she deactivates her Sight and rubs at her eyes. "I could see a lot more than I thought, it was very confusing to look at," she tells Septette. "Let me just... sit down. I have a headache again." She steps to the side of the room to sit back against a wall. "It's hard to say what I was looking at besides... Well, it's a complex enchantment. Your mind is an impossibly complex enchantment."
Septette Arcubielle	Septette 'blinks' once or twice as she rouses herself from her trance-like state, looking rather thoughtful, and steps into an adjoining room while motioning for Ainsley to follow. This one's better-furnished than the teleporter room, with comfortable-looking chairs arranged around a small table, along with some teacups and a pot. "Do you drink tea, little one? Or coffee? You look like you could use something to perk you up," she remarks, sounding a little concerned. "Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by that," the little robot muses as she pulls one of the chairs out, offering it to Ainsley. "Yggdrasil is- was- quite adept at those sorts of magic. Still, there's nothing in our blueprints about it... perhaps it was intentionally obscured. You've given me quite a bit to think about already." Septette looks a bit relieved, though it's hard to say whether her relief stems from getting a concrete answer, or from the simple fact that the 'reading' is over for the moment.
Ainsley	Ainsley gets up to follow, her eyes watering and her mouth drooping into a frown. The more comfortable nature of the room isn't scrutinized too much, the lizard lady making her way to a seat and flopping into it. She pulls her tail over her lap and keeps her eyes closed for the time being, smiling silently at Septette's words except for saying "Tea," to answer the magic robot gal. "It's not something that could easily be written down," she explains, "And it may have been obscured for the same reason creating life is forbidden in many worlds: It could come with dire consequences for those who don't know what they're doing, or even those that do." She clasps her hands in her lap, her head canted thoughtfully to one side.
Septette Arcubielle	The little robot girl simply drops a couple of tea bags in the teapot, then extends her clawed hand towards it and murmurs a couple of words under her breath. In just a few seconds, it starts to steam; a moment or two later, she pours Ainsley a cup and pushes some sugar cubes towards the adorable lizard. "That's entirely possible," she replies. "Even with Yggdrasil overseeing the manufacturing process personally, a few of us ended up being not quite right in the head. It's also possible that it didn't want us to be easily reverse-engineered; I know that it took other precautions to that effect." Finally, Septette seats herself across from her guest, more for the sake of courtesy than comfort, and pours herself a cup of tea as well. "That does put me at ease somewhat. If there are no physical components to it, that means that I don't need to worry about wear-and-tear." Sip. "... Thank you for having a look at me, Ainsley. Please let me know if there's anything I can do for you in return." Far from an empty courtesy, it seems that Septette is quite earnest about that.
Ainsley	Ainsley carefully puts two cubes of sugar into her tea cup and stirs it with the little utensil, then sips at it. This is a very slow act, because she obviously has a terrible headache from focusing too hard on something so complex for that long. She takes solace in the fact that it wasn't as big of a brick to the face as Scion was, at least. "For now, the tea is fine. I'll let you know if there's anything I need help with later," she tells Septette.
Septette Arcubielle	Septette gazes at her guest for a few moments over the brim of her teacup before setting it down again, empty. "I think we have some paracetamol, if that's compatible with your biochemistry," she says at length. "Apologies if I've made you strain yourself." The little robot adjusts her cloak awkwardly, trying to get it to wrap snugly around her angular shoulders. "At any rate, I'm glad that you didn't see anything that taxed you too badly. Thank you for trusting me." Those last words come out more softly than the others, as if she's unsure of whether to say them at all, lest she jinx something.
Ainsley	"It's a magical headache, medicine doesn't do much for it," Ainsley explains, rubbing at the side of her face while she says it. She pulls her feet up to hold her knees against her chest, enjoying the tea and seeming a little miserable from the pain. "It takes trust in me to ask me to help you," she says, "I'm glad I could look at you without something going terribly wrong. A headache is small potatoes compared to the trouble I ran into from the first big sights I've looked at."
Septette Arcubielle	"I suppose that makes sense," she muses, and then splits into a grin at Ainsley's last comment. "You'll find that, for a war machine, I am surprisingly harmless. Most people do tend to mellow with age, after all!" Septette inclines her head slightly, then nods as she tries to put her rationale into words. "Some people get the impression that I'm too quick to trust. That's not quite true. I'm just faster at figuring people out than most. It comes with practice." Glancing up to meet Ainsley's eyes, she continues: "We've not seen much of one another; that's true. But from just a few pieces, you can get a feel for the entire puzzle. I trust what I've seen from you."
Ainsley	"Mmh." Ainsley doesn't have much else to say. She manages a smile, instead, for the kindly war machine that made tea for her. She has to shut her eyes soon after, and finishes off her cup of tea, settling into her seat until, or if, Septette breaks the silence.