She had it. She had it. Perfect synchronization. Divinity in thought and body. She'd [i]had [/i]it.

How had she lost it? Where did it go? Why wasn't she smart any more, why wasn't she in sync any more, why wasn't she calm any more? Her hands were shaking, her mouth was dry, her temples throbbed. Why? She'd had it right. All she'd needed to do was exist unchanged. All she'd needed to do was defend perfection. But now it had been stolen from her right at the most critical moment and she didn't know why. She felt tired, she felt cramped, she felt angry, she felt everything except hunger.

That was how it had always been. She remembers dimly setting a timer to remind her when to drink water, a little clockwork gadget from the TC, sold in an Evercity curio shop, shaped like some sort of jagged tropical fruit. The little bastard tyrant stood between her and the flow state. She'd absently smashed it because it had distracted her during the first fight with Mirror. The Aeteline couldn't replicate it. The concept of time was irrelevant to the perfect war machine and even maintaining an internal clock would have been a misallocation of resources.

But without the little machine's tyranny she'd needed to invent the concept of biological needs from scratch. She'd run machine diagnostics and tested her reaction time, checking to see if the fault was with the crab leg, with the structural damage she'd sustained in the recent fight, with any aspect of her true body before finally conceding to the possibility it was caused by her false one. And so she staggers out into the world, only dimly aware of what she was looking for.