Hand movements. Blinking. More hand movements. All were accompanied by detailed pictograms of various items and animals 001 first seen in the green puppet's moving pictures. She was not stupid, as she understood the attempts of her inept host. Each gesture she was shown was connected to the image that came with it. Some gestures were accompanied by moving pictograms, symbolizing the process of various acts, like sleeping, eating, talking and whatnot.

001 did not have many issues with learning these gestures. As the cycles came and passed and she slowly grew older, she became more and more accustomed to using them. Her clear mind was able to easily understand the sentiments of her host, who after some time introduced himself to her through the gestures, they had learned together prior.

He used a symbol for ‘come’, or ‘getting closer’, which he then followed by the symbol of the Sky ... Ceiling? … whatever that is supposed to be. Looks pretty in his moving pictures. Closing Sky? Coming Sky? Closing-in Sky? Hmm … maybe later. I am still missing something here.

Sky did treat her well, as good as a floating puppet that is always busy can. She had her small place in the corner of his room, enough green food to keep her full, and direct access to the pipe she originally came through. 001 used the freedom to explore her immediate surroundings, her path always monitored by one of these floating eyes. As she understood that her host and his eyes were connected, she felt oddly safe with it in her vicinity. Whenever she stumbled or fell, the handplants appeared out of seemingly nowhere and helped her back up. He did care, even if his puppet utterly failed to show that care to her.

If you show a bit more interest in person, I will use your gestures to answer. Like that? … I enjoy it too much to see you beep in frustration. You can do better … Closing Sky.

Writing back and forth so many times took the entire time her grappler required to move her puppet to the lowest levels. She had moved passively while her mind was absorbed in her dialogue. After all, Gales had spent no time at all to prepare an adequate welcome to her saviour. Needless to say, she was taken by surprise to not only see her marked friend, but also five more mortals in the section she tasked her Overseer to lead them to. Three of them she did know quite well from trauma treatment, and they recognized her face as well, she noticed in amusement. The three fearsome lizards, each began wagging their tails.

"I was expecting you, Scavenger. I am glad to see you returned. And you brought company! Been a while since I last saw these three beauties running across my screens.~"

The marked Scavenger appeared taken back by that remark and glanced at his fellow Scavengers. Gales literally could see his brain rattling as he counted his allies. One, two ... but she mentioned three. His gaze went down to the lizard he was still riding on, and his expression lighted up in delayed understanding. Gales softened up her screen-faced expression and nodded affirmatively.

“Indeed. Lizard 025 as well as 098 and 099 know me. I helped them to get over the trauma that was growing up in Approaching Sky’s vicinity. Did you know that your partner loves to get his antennas scratched?”

Gales lowered down her suspended position to be now on eye-level with her saviour. She tilted her head as his company began moving past her, seemingly uninterested in her words. Oh, of course, they were not listening. She hadn’t marked them. All they heard were the beeping, clanking and screeching of her artificial voice.

She pointed to the two scavengers and faced their leader.

“Can you please tell them to come closer? I would like to bestow my mark of communication to them to render this conversation a lot easier, well at least for you.”

The leader’s red eyes widened, and he shook his head firmly, the pearls, which by now contained her gifts as well, clanging against his back spikes.

“No … mark?” A nod. “I … think I understand. You want to remain special?” Yet another nod. “Fine. Only a mark for my saviour. Under one condition, however, given I already have to interact with your kind. You stay for a bit and allow me to learn your language. If I can’t rely on the mark, I have to possess another way to communicate. … I even will sweeten the deal with a pearl, how about that?”

The scavenger scratched his chin, the tempting offer scratching his itch for the fourth karmic sin. Eventually, he nodded his head followed by a series of hand movements and a few throaty sounds.

First, he pointed to himself. A low growl accompanied by the clenching of his fist, which pressed against an invisible force, followed. The next word he expressed by the gurgling sound of water while his hands mimicked a wave. The gestures ended with him holding both fists against each other and imitating the breaking of something with a cracking sound and the sudden movements of his hands.

Gales was fascinated by the first taste of his language and put her entire processing power into understanding what he tried to convey.

“Your name? Fist and growl … Powerful? Mighty? … no, that’s not it. Resistance and power. Unrelenting? A nod, unrelenting it is. The second one is easy. That has to be Wave. Yes? Good! The third one as well. The breaking of a twig. Breaker.

You are Unrelenting Wave Breaker. Am I correct in my translation?”

An excited nod, Breaker’s eyes glowed up in childish joy. He raised his three-fingered hand and lowered the first and second finger, pointing with the other hand on the third.

“The third. Breaker. Do you want me to refer to you with that short version? I see. Breaker it is. Knowing your name alone renders things much more personal, my sincerest thanks.” 

What a fascinating development! They not only possess a language akin to sign language but also take on names, not unlike the names of my peers. But less complicated than the names of my former citizens. I like it!

I have to learn more about them. It is not as if I don’t have the time in my current predicament for exactly that. Maybe … just maybe I can develop a rudimentary Translation Pearl Whisper and Lives could utilize to solve their Scavenger problems. I would be useful to them.~

“But to get back to the reason why I was expecting you, Breaker. I see your company is loaded with explosives. That will render my query quite a bit easier.

… So … how to best explain it without triggering the taboo …”

Gales floated back up and sent a mental signal to one of her very few remaining Overseers to accompany her in her mission briefing. She instructed in wise precaution Breaker to keep his warriors prepared for the zappy entrance of her purposed organism. It took a bit of convincing on her side, however, to bring the Overseer into the vicinity of three dangerous scavengers, each armed with spears. But eventually, her mobile projector was at her side and connected with a small electrical spark to her puppet’s umbilical arm. 

Shifting Gales opened a screen through her Overseer and projected in the dim room a shining blue 3D representation of her superstructure. With a crack of electricity, she ordered her organism to flash up the contaminated veins of hers. At three distinct locations flashed up a warning in the symbolistic language of the Ancients.

Gales was surprised to hear an audible gasp from Breaker, did he understand the meaning of the danger symbol? He did. How curious! Do they possess a rudimentary written language as well? More to ask at a later point in time.

Gales floated up to the projection and pointed to the error symbol that flashed up around her Underhang.

“Around here I lost a few cycles ago a decent chunk of my Underhang. You might have come across the ruins on the surface while you ascended to me. The reason for my loss is the acid in my veins. At this point, my Pumpworks already dissolved and have flooded my entire lowest layer, in consequence. I am at risk of losing my entire Underhang and the crucial stability of my Can.

I have a mission for you and your partners. I will pay handsomely for it, mainly because it will be a thing I myself can’t do under any circumstances, thanks to the very helpful limitations our architects built us with. … But these are worries for me and Suns to discuss.

Now … listen closely because the self-destruction taboo prohibits me from thinking about what I need, not to mention even wording it out.

… The acid, the burning in my veins. I need it gone. My Overseer will lead you to a critical point in my Can. Help the acid to leave my body. Do you understand, Breaker?”

Breaker slowly nodded. He reached for his belt and removed the bomb. Carefully he placed it under the palm of his hand. With his maw, he mimicked the sound of an explosion, which he followed by loosening up his hand and simulating the movement of water.

Gales nodded in delight. He did understand. This would make everything so much easier. The Iterator feared that she would have issues with communicating her desires, which luckily was not the case. Sky’s breed of scavengers was astoundingly sharp. A character trait Gales was now quite thankful for.

In her trauma treatment sessions, she always cursed her neighbour for making the beasts he sent her way too self-aware, given how he raised them … which meant not at all. But to experience the fruits of his experiments this way, with her being able to have complex talks with Breaker … she vowed to herself to hug that antisocial Iterator as a thank you once the staff would allow her to do that. Even if he would clearly dislike that. Hate it even. But Gales didn’t care.

Breaker and his company left nearly immediately, eyes glowing in greed and devotion … and something else she couldn’t process fully. Especially the other Scavengers struck her as suspicious, how they avoided her gaze and moved the whole time to stay in the Iterator’s blind spot.

You have weird company, Breaker. But if you trust them, why shouldn’t I? Now all that is left is to wait until the doctors will treat their patient. That action should grant me a few more hundred cycles, hopefully.

Shifting Gales’ insides were as empty as they were safe. No burning rain to hinder their pace. No fearsome beasts except for some annoying spiders to deal with. Breaker, Rain and Coast followed the Overseer to the place his goddess showed him. Breaker wondered about her request. She wanted them to hurt her to help her. What an odd practice. But they would get paid, and payment was in Breaker’s hierarchy above thinking a plan over. Greed was a powerful enemy of his kind.

It didn’t take long until the group encountered the first hallway fully submerged under the green and yellow glowing liquid. Only witnessing the presence of that much burning water caused Breaker’s fur to sizzle in displeasure. Even the air was their enemy. The floating eye noticed the flooded corridor and quickly rerouted its path through the labyrinth further and further down.

Rain hurts brethren, Rain makes lizard crazy. Gales filled with hurting water. Goddess is suffering. Breaker desires to help. If bombs help, Breaker with bring more.

A quarter cycle later the Overseer finally led the group through a pipe to the outside. Entering Shifting Gales’ Underhang was a challenge by itself. Steep gales caused stray acid droplets to wash over the group and forced them to jump and leap from one protecting wall to the next, dodging the wind. Breaker quickly realized that Crusher was too clumsy for that area and left him back at the pipe exit after having promised his return to his old adversary.

Rain and Coast were luckier. Their cyan lizards were made to best the Underhang. Breaker struggled to keep up with the hotshots but kept his cool and avoided throwing insults at his kin. When he finally caught up with them at the rendezvous point, the two scavengers were already unloading their bombs and placed them on a pile.

‘Bombs ready, Breaker.’ Rain that Crackles nodded to the larger Scavenger. ‘Floating eye stopped.’

‘Weak point above. Stay back. Breaker place bombs. Coast protect. Look for Vultures. Rain stays with Breaker.’

The two Scavengers nodded in unison, Coast swinging on his Cyan and leaping to an elevated platform above them. Rain on the other hand stood back and walked over to his mount, eyes locked on Breaker.

Breaker grabbed the bombs one by one and climbed up the mess of panels and cables to the area the Overseer pointed at with its floating arrow. It took a good while to place all five orbs in a circle and took Breaker all his concentration to not accidentally set one off. He was not worried about his safety thanks to the warriors keeping him safe and warned.

After placing the last explosive in a tangled web of cables, Breaker grabbed his spear and used the butt of it to prod the explosives one by one, causing a small impact trauma to the bombs. The small deformation would grant him enough time to make some distance, time he desperately required based on past knowledge about the effect of multiple bombs.

The Scavenger leapt and jumped from platform to platform, his eyes scanning the Underbody of Gales for his kin. It was odd that he didn’t see any of the two, but the immediate explosion cut off any sprouting thoughts in his head, as the marvel of destruction caught his whole attention.

The bombs were surprisingly effective. Probably because of the fact, that the structure was already weakened by the burning water. Breaker didn’t think that the resulting explosion would be that massive, but the spectacle in front of him proved him otherwise. Five bombs were way too many after all.

As the explosives went off, Gales' underside got engulfed in a massive fireball, which pushed a hot wave of ear-deafening air to wash over Breaker, which forced him to dig his claw-like fingers in the cables that held him on the platform. His eyes went wide as the burning spectacle was extinguished mere moments later by a sheer torrent of green water. Huge amounts of that burning liquid left Gales’ body, so much that even Breaker could imagine the pain his machine goddess was in. He stood there for multiple minutes and watched the river of acid leaving Gales’ Can, his eyes trailing over the area in his search for Ocean’s warriors.

Odd. Kin loves watching explosions. Young blood missed show. Strange behaviour. Where Rain, where Coast? Scavengers left Breaker behind? … Concerned.

Gales felt the rush of blinding pain in her Underhang the moment the explosives went off. But thanks to the acid the resulting agony was oddly bearable. With the acid having already dissolved most of the microbes and Strata that could report the pain to her, the forceful opening of her underbody felt numb, somewhat disappointing even.

But the sheer relief of her lower chambers emptying and resurfacing caused Gales instead to shout in pleasant relief, throwing her hands up to the ceiling.

“T-that hurts so good! … Void! … I don’t care a-about the pain, r-regaining feeling in 10% of my body is s-such a rush! I-I have a lower body. I can feel my l-legs again … I … Ancients! I am THAT broken!? S-stop! No m-more error signals! I-I am aware!!”

Shifting Gales kneeled now on the floor on all fours, clenched her fists to brace herself against the invisible enemy. Her consciousness got flooded with tons of piled-up error messages, all having waited in queue until Gales would fix the connection. A flood of error messages overwhelmed her consciousness so severely, that she hardly felt the approaching presence and only barely noticed the impact of two metal rebars on her shoulder blades.

The spears shattered on impact with her puppet’s reinforced upper body and Gales finally recognized the presence of the not-so-unknown culprits. Sneaking up on an Iterator cowering in pain and attempting to strike at her weakest!? That could only mean one thing.

ENEMIES?! TRAITORS! Whispy was right!