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227 - Sauer Pt. 2 [Cherno]
🕑 Added 2024-09-10 02:46:30 +0000 UTCSauer looked around.
“Interesting construct. Remarkably stable. From the looks of this mental space… Yes, this will give us a bit more time.”
“A low-footprint engram should not be this responsive. Not without supporting hardware.”
“And you should not be able to sustain such a high-resolution mental construct without supporting hardware. Perhaps whatever machinery you are connected to also enables me to function in this manner, hm? Ah, but… Who knows. I am a mere engram after all,” he retorted. For just a moment, a familiar grin flashed over his face.
“But-”
“Shut up. I don’t care about your suspicions, I don’t care about your deep dark secrets, and I certainly do not care about how come you’re a twenty-something full-organic again. Do you want my help or not? After this, I’m done. Gone. No more Sauer. Does it matter how this mere engram can function to this extent? Have you not seen stranger things in your time?”
She tried to query Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom regarding Sauer’s engram, and got nothing.
Krahe gave engram-Sauer a martial bow, cupping her left fist with her right hand in front of herself.
Sauer laughed.
“Come now, I am not real. Less than even a ghost, I’m probably still alive. Now, where to start. I can only draw upon your severely lacking martial education, so if you’d let me…”
Krahe clearly felt the subtle pressure of Sauer’s request in the back of her head. She let him in, deciding to share everything she knew as far as martial arts went, as well as some memories she had of Sauer — those of his real demonstrations, plus one other. Engram-Sauer’s eyes lit up, and his left arm changed to something she recognized, yet something she had never seen the real Sauer wear. Indeed, it was the arm she had seen during the Six-eyed Dream Serpent venom vision.
“Yes. This will do. Let’s start with a demonstration, then.”
Without another word, he re-enacted the kata Krahe had seen him performing in her vision. Then, he did it again, and again, and again, increasingly breaking it down into individual movements with each repetition. If Krahe didn’t quite grasp a movement the first go round, engram-Sauer would repeat it without her needing to say anything. After that came practical training, and to her great relief, Krahe found that she could channel thauma with impunity — this wasn’t physical reality, after all. She lost track of time, and eventually even the awareness that this wasn’t actually Sauer faded out of awareness.
Engram-Sauer gradually unfolded what Krahe had seen in her vision into something altogether different, something complete and even beyond that. To call it a single technique wasn’t right — it was an entire movement method, combining intentional off-rhythm awkwardness with explosive movements. Each motion could flow into at least three others, and each end-pose would allow for a wide variety of attacks. There was a subset of altered movements that treated user’s enhanced arm as a defensive implement, positioned to interpose it between any incoming attacks and the user.
“Now, let us incorporate armaments. By the looks of it, you no longer possess the Blackhands. What are your current preferences?”
Krahe took a moment to put things in terms that would make sense to Sauer, then listed off the tools she most preferred to use: “A ring-trigger pistol, either hand. A dagger, also either hand. Monowire, left-handed, single or multi-strand up to one for each finger. Back-mounted attack tendril — can be blunt, piercing, or explosive-tipped. Generalized short-medium range inbuilt energy weapons, left hand, from the palm. Lastly, an inbuilt homing missile launcher — it requires a few seconds of preparation. This entails using the aforementioned pistol to shoot a special bullet at any point on the left arm. The missile is an autonomous radiation emitter with a standoff range of several meters and articulated fingers for grabbing onto targets.”
As she did this, she shared memories of each tool’s characteristics, quickly fleshing out aspects she couldn’t easily put into words without going on at length.
“I see. Good choices,” said Sauer, rubbing his chin. He remained in thought for some time, before walking to his hut. He emerged immediately afterwards, bearing a pistol in hand and dagger on his waist. The gun was known to Krahe — an affordable and widespread deliver method for high-yield special ammunition, the Wolf and Raven Lawbringer Type-5. The gun was single-shot, but designed to sync up with a support armature that could select and load ammunition at lightning speed. Mimicking that functionality to the fullest was still out of reach for Krahe’s tar-tendrils, but not as far as it had once been. A robot walked out after him, a huge, clumsy thing made of scrapped-together military salvage, its armor pitted with bullet holes and gashes. The robot, too, was known to her. A “Big Mook” as the real Sauer had called them. This one was based on her memory of Big Mook 21.
Sauer began with the pistol-adjusted version of the base kata, and moved on in the same order as Krahe had listed things out.
Whether hours, days, or weeks passed, Krahe didn’t know, and didn’t care. The sun never set on this desert of glass, and she never felt thirst, hunger, or exhaustion. There was just one problem: Her arm couldn’t actually facilitate the full extent of what engram-Sauer was showing her. It was only capable of a limited, simplified variant, similar to what she had done during the mansion raid.
Over, and over, and over again. And over, and over, and over again, Krahe tried, even if she felt it was pointless, if for no other reason than the delusional desire to bring that vision to life. She hadn’t been sure back then, but she was absolutely certain now: That vision hadn’t been a mere hallucination, and neither had been any of the others. Somehow, the Six-eyed Dream Serpent had truly shown her reality — more than that, it had, in a way, taken her there. Sauer’s hut, that alley in Sector 5, the shore of that alien lake, even the rapid-fire flashes of saints rooting out corruption wherever they went. Whether it was delusion or truth, she didn’t know or care — Krahe fully believed that those things had been real.
“Stop. That’s enough. It’s clear that you lack the proper hardware to execute the method. What do we do when our hardware is lacking?!”
“Change things until it works,” Krahe replied without thinking.
“Correct. Change the method, change the hardware, whatever is easiest, whatever is most effective.”
