Status Update: 5
For once, you almost wish to be standing out in the downpour. It would at least rinse you out. But you value your neurons too much to dare try, so you just have to tolerate being disgusting for the time being. Besides, you'll probably have to swim back out of your biological processing facility anyway. You'll get yourself cleaned off then.
Your food is mostly untouched by the blood and gore. Not that it really matters, since you can't taste it, but the thought of consuming something covered in blood makes you shudder. You quickly shove the bubble seeds up at your neurons to get your mind off the matter. (-2 bubble seed)
But you're safe here. You'll be fine. You'll be getting out of here soon.
[3 actions left.]
>Inspect beak
You do not want to look at it, but you probably should, at least to assess what you have on hand. Reluctantly, you pull the beak towards you to give it a glance over.
You only took one of the beak pieces; the other half must have landed... somewhere else. You certainly didn't see it. The gore attached seems to be only a small chunk of the front of the Miros quail's head, and it is too small for you to identify any features that may have previously been attached to it. For that you are deeply grateful; you're not sure you would be able to get the image of a dead Miros quail eye staring at you out of your mind. You could just delete the memory, you suppose, but still.
The beak itself, though covered in grime currently, looks structurally sound. The serrated edges of the beak are razor sharp, as is the tip of the beak. If you were to jam this into the flesh of some beast, you would certainly tear a nasty wound into its side. You may need to sharpen this somewhat as general day to day use wears it down, but for now, once it's adhered to a pole or handle of some sort, it will serve as a dangerous and lethal weapon. Perfect for keeping threats at bay.
You run your hand over the smooth side of the beak, feeling along the small grooves and dents in the metal. These avians are strange. You have some data downloaded about their predecessors, the Miros vultures, but not enough to really understand how they ended up like this. Mutations in purposed organisms aren't unheard of; in fact, you would say it's rather expected. Altering the genetic material of a creature to this extent, whether through genetic scrambling, recombination with its own DNA, or splicing of foreign genetic material, inherently causes instability in the genomic structure. Later blueprints for purposed organisms took this into careful consideration, and they were created with redundant coding against aberrant cell replication written into every cell, but over the natural passage of time, mistakes... find a way regardless.
Iterators are much the same way. You yourself are, at your very core, a hyperengineered purposed organism. Even your puppet is, but your can more so. But perhaps you got too used to your own cellular machinery functioning as it should, since what you saw of the Miros quail... You shudder. It must hurt, to be warped in that way by your own biology.
The base of the beak is currently obscured by the flesh still attached, but once you clean that off, you just need something to weld it onto. You'll likely find something in your heavy metal processing facility, but if not, you could probably pick up a few loose pieces of rebar and weld those together too. You'll still need some sort of tool, possibly a spear or a sharp rock, to help you clean off the gore from the beak, but you'll handle that when the rain stops.
[2 actions left.]
>Rank all the iterators you know from most to least favorite? Just curious, definitely no particular reason I'm asking...
You stare down the overseer. It clearly does not care, twirling in place cheerfully right in front of you. You know if you try to reach for it so you can squeeze its neural circuits until they pop, it would just teleport away, so you don't bother trying. You're too tired for it.
...
Out of the triplets... if you really had to pick, you'd probably have to rank Des first. If not because she's your best friend, then because she would complain at you for not putting her first. You have known her longest, after all, if only for a few cycles more than Night and Silver. But you really couldn't pick one out of the three of them. They're your closest friends, and you wouldn't be who you are today if it weren't for them. You owe everything to them.
Moon would be next, you suppose. She was always so wise, so kind, always knowing what to do and say. You always admired her cool confidence; she always seemed so sure of herself, no matter what happened. And she would let you endlessly bother her with questions, especially when you were young. "Big sis" was... a very appropriate name for her to give herself.
And then, Wind. Always caring, though more than a little overbearing. Wind worries. That has always been what things were like. It only got worse after Silver died. You care about Wind too, you just wish Wind was less smothering sometimes.
You're... not sure whether you'd put Moth next, or Sig. You don't know Sig very well; if you talked to them at all, it was always in the local group chat. Stars, Des probably knows them better than you do, seeing as he considers them her mentor.
But you don't know Moth that well either. Or... you thought you did, once, but it turned out that you didn't know sem at all. You still respect sem, and Sig too, but you don't know how to rank either of them.
... and then there is Five Pebbles. No, no. You'd put Suns above him. You respected Suns. Still do, to an extent. But you don't understand how they can be so friendly towards Five Pebbles, when...
...
You still hate Grace and Prayer more. Especially Grace. Could anyone have expected iterators called Gracious Mercy and One Final Prayer to commit such atrocities? You certainly didn't, back when you still considered them friends. Even thinking about them makes your fury writhe uncomfortably inside of you.
...
... you... forgot Day. How did you forget Day?
... you refuse to rank her. What she means to you can't be represented with this asinine ranking structure.
[1 action left.]
>Can you find a replacement for your cloak? Or clean yourself? The smell could make you get in trouble with creatures in the next cycle.
Not... right now? You would absolutely love to, but if you go now, you will get killed by the rain. There aren't other sources of water you could use to wash yourself off with. The priority when the rain stops will definitely be to clean yourself off though.
...
You miss Des. You... avoided talking to her. You're still not sure why you chose to do that, especially when she was begging you to respond.
...
He probably thinks you're dead. Why wouldn't he, when you're not in your can to manage your communication arrays? And he has no way to confirm that you're alive, just...
You curl into yourself in a hopeless attempt to keep the gnawing guilt from growing in your chest as you start to power down.