But what about Bob? [Shepard and Sarah; possibly open to threadjacking later idk]

[hows_the_knee]

who: Shepard & Sarah
what: Exploring the station. And possible definite grilling about each others' respective AIs.
where: Lost in a holographic nightmare.
when: Right about the time that blacktwo and nobletwo fuck up the holograms try and turn the lights back on.
warning(s): Angry, angry Sarah.

Comments

[terminatenomore]

The Terminator responded in less than five minutes. It also brought two shotguns, one holographic, the other very real. It recognized that Sarah explicitly said she wasn't in any danger, but it also wised up to that fact that when the two of them were in close proximity, trouble liked to follow.

It rounded a corner to meet them, it was plucking out tiny twigs and leaves that matted in it's messy crew cut. When it got the call, it was watching the holographic fantasy bird creatures from something in-game called a Life Tree. First time the Terminator ever got to find a tree with branches capable of holding it's immense weight. Damn right it jumped on that opportunity.

"Sarah-" it greeted before drifting off when it saw she was being accompanied by,

"Commander Shepard." The Terminator might have looked shocked, but only might. The Terminator concluded this was no doubt about the incident when it first met the commander. It looked back at Sarah, motioning to Shepard-

"She started it."

[cmdr_renegade]

"I didn't start shit," Shepard snapped and reached for her gun, almost reflexively. She caught herself before she drew it, fortunately, and merely clenched her fingers around the grip. Bob the combat drone only got ornery around birds and cameras, in her experience, but now that Shepard was arguing with its master, there was no telling what it'd haul off and do.

This was especially the case, if Legion had gone and infected it with pesky free will.

It also had two too many shotguns for her express comfort, archaic or not.

"You were the one crouched in the bushes like a two-ton, combat drone, stalker," Shepard added and glanced at Sarah. "Bob the birdwatcher, here, is your kill bot?"

[hows_the_knee]

"That's right," Sarah confirmed, crossing her arms and looking between Shepard and the Terminator. "I don't know about any birdwatching, but yeah." She glanced at Shepard's hand gripping her gun. "So you might wanna relax before you make it too nervous."

She looked back at the Terminator. "I take it you two know each other. Feel like sharing with the class?"

[terminatenomore]

"To clarify," the Terminator kept it's eyes on Shepard while it spoke, hands on the trigger of the very real shotgun. Had Shepard's hand moved even one inch more earlier, the cyborg would've gone what most humans refer to as- 'ape shit.'

"Both our encounters were in which the Commander approached us, not the reverse," it paused to brush off a few stray twigs clinging to it's clothes, "the first time we prevented her from documenting our presence, the second we had to protect ourselves when the Commander was heavily intoxicated and threatening a rare species of swallow."

It not so subtly took a side step, moving in between Sarah and Shepard. Not enough to obstruct both women from each other, just enough to make itself known as something that took it's job as the dumb muscle with a hair trigger very seriously.

[cmdr_renegade]

"To clarify," Shepard repeated flatly, "In both these situations you've sprung up like a daisy with a shotgun."

She didn't like Bob, but truth be told, she didn't dislike him either, he was a machine. A machine that was straddling the line between real threat and overgrown luggage cart, at the moment, but a machine nonetheless. Shepard calmed down first, since she was the only one capable of it, and all but rolled her eyes as she shifted both her hands back to her hips.

"Well, call me charmed, yet again," Shepard mused as she turned (most of) her attention back to Sarah. As ridiculous as it sounded, her clothing dated him, too. Even bots in her time couldn't hack a Geth, so whatever he'd gotten out of Legion was likely on a voluntary basis

[hows_the_knee]

Sarah glanced at the Terminator and nodded. "Stand down," she said. "We're okay here." She hesitated for a moment, eying the twigs and leaves still stuck to its clothes, but ultimately decided not to comment. They had more important things to worry about at the moment.

Like where exactly this Legion was. And what it was up to, if it wasn't here. She glanced at Shepard and raised her eyebrows. "Having trouble finding your trusty AI?"

ACCOUNT FAIL.

[terminatenomore]

The Terminator backed off with her word, simple as that. It moved to Sarah's side and holstering it's shotgun, but not without trying to get the final word

[cmdr_renegade]

Still be damaged?

It was only by the virtue of her many years glaring down ornery grunts that she managed to keep her face perfectly unmoved. She hadn't been aware that Legion was damaged, at all. Sarah didn't seem to know much about Legion at all, so if this bot had knowledge, it wasn't sharing. At the moment, much to Shepard's chagrin, it seemed to have more knowledge than her.

"Long enough," Shepard answered vaguely and let her hand drop away from the comm at her ear. She looked at Sarah exclusively, her voice as carefully even as her expression. "But, just the same, I don't think he'd going to make it over in a timely manner.

"Perhaps we should start our questioning on your end," Shepard suggested and motioned blithely at the huge combat drone.

[hows_the_knee]

"Fine with me," Sarah replied evenly, matching Shepard's expression. Legion was damaged, and T-800 knew it - that was interesting, and definitely something she was going to be asking about.

But it could wait.

She turned to the T-800, nodding shortly. "Tell her what you told me. Everything about your encounter with Legion."

[terminatenomore]

Suddenly being on the spot was never a comfortable situation to be in, be you man or machine. The Terminator looked between Sarah and Shepard, assessing which of the two women would be more likely to strike it, and the hardest, if it resisted or slipped up in some way. During it's time on the station, it learned people hit you when you say something perfectly logical, but somehow offensive to them. And these two looked easily offended. People were weird.

"Everything?" It asked, eyebrow raised as if to say, 'you can't be serious.'

"Sarah Connor, we recommended some discrepancy."

[hows_the_knee]

"Recommendation noted," Sarah replied, staring him down. "Now tell her exactly what happened, and everything you learned about Legion in the process."

At this point, she was more inclined to trust Shepard than the Terminator - at least when it came to Legion, and whatever had happened between the two AIs. She couldn't hope for any help from Shepard in preventing the Terminator from flipping out and going into extreme self-preservation mode if the other woman didn't have all the data available.

And there was no way she wasn't going to do everything she could to prevent that from happening.

[terminatenomore]

"There was data exchange regarding our origins," The Terminator explained in brief, one because that actually is the gist of what happened, and it knew including it's ability to read Normandy encryption would be a drastic misstep. "The extreme nature of geth origins over powered our comparatively out of date systems, that it was happened."

It turned back to Sarah and said what sealed it's fate as an idiot for all eternity, "While there were side effects, what we had was what we understand to be a 'one night stand,' and therefore effectively meaningless."

In logical, literal-thinking cyborg world, a 'one night stand' came up in it's database as a brief encounter with no expectations of a follow up. It just didn't explain the nature of said encounter. So it assumed it was using it in it's proper context. Hoh boy.

[cmdr_renegade]

After their first meeting, and that thumbs-up it'd given her, Shepard expected this bot to do a lot of strange things. A high five, shouting some unusual catch phrases, humming a commercial theme, hell, even flipping her the bird wouldn't have been particularly unusual....but the phrase one night stand coming out of it was...to say the least...jarring.

Shepard blinked, tried to stare harder, and blinked again.

"Wait," she said after a moment and pressed a hand against her forehead. "You had a...what? I couldn't have heard that correctly."

She couldn't have heard that correctly.

"Okay, nevermind," Shepard changed the subject quickly and let her hand fall away from her forehead. "You told each other about your origins? Define that. Just how much elaboration did Legion do?"

If Legion had been in a sharing mood, it was reasonable to assume he'd shared about the format of his network, maybe even the Morning War, possibly, and this was a stretch, the Quarians. If he'd really been in a sharing mood, and origins was defined a little more

[hows_the_knee]

Sarah just gave the Terminator an incredulous look. She might have had more experience with its quirks than Shepard did, but even so, that was a new one.

Obviously its Skynet programming hadn't included much in the way of slang.

Sarah shook her head, putting it aside as something to explain to the Terminator later. As usual, there was turning out to be a lot they'd have to talk about later.

For the moment, she merely nodded, granting permission to answer Shepard's questions.

"While you're at it," she added, "define 'overpowering your systems.' What exactly did this encounter do to you?"

[terminatenomore]

"Did we say something wrong?"

Now the Terminator was just confused, Shepard and Sarah appeared to react negatively to it's calling the incident a one night stand. Was that...not what it means? Why won't anyone ever tell it what a one night stand means?

Back to the point at hand, and the entire reason it was dragged here,

"The exact nature of the damage done to our systems is unclear, when we passed a recording of the exchange, not the data, along to Delta, it was his theory it created a sub-routine that overtook out core personality with geth sentimentalities."

We'll tell T when he's older.

[cmdr_renegade]

"Geth sentimentalities," Shepard repeated and resisted the urge to scowl. That was a loaded statement if she'd ever heard one. No. No, it was seriously unlikely that Legion would have passed along the Heretic mindset. If this bot was talking about Geth anything, he was talking about the variety who didn't want to follow the Reapers around.

"Well, that could be worse," Shepard admitted aloud and looked at Sarah. "Remember how I told you about the existential option. That's pretty much what he's talking about."

She looked back at Bob and considered her next statement very carefully. If he didn't know about the Reapers, this would prompt him to ask...but, if he did, Shepard wanted to know about it immediately. When she spoke again it was very clearly and very slowly, as though she were talking to a child and wanted to make sure there was no room for interpretation.

"Did Legion give you data on the 'old machines?'"