Day ??? of year 384 Post-Downfall
74:21:75 LNT (early evening) 
Sunstorm imminent

	Notrau appeared to be watching Gramps keenly, even as the man stood with his back turned to him. If the Eighfourian's demeanor was severe, momentarily faltering, then the renegade Anderekian was more akin to tensioned spring, stiff and but for his eyes, almost motionless. Only once the device embedded in Kay's head was mentioned did the young man's eyes briefly flicker to the woman, then return.
	"It looks different from the enhancements I saw embedded in the bodies of the men and women I fought. Could be from some other faction. Or maybe just older tech. Kay-Gee, she told me a bit about its discovery, and her accident. It's not [i]new,[/i] but it's also from someone who clearly lived a fair bit post-Downfall. So it was some fragment that had survived, and rebuilt after; as such, it was unlikely the environment got them. Must have been some other faction. Whether it was my old hosts or someone else." 
	Kay-Gee seemed to be taken aback by the notion of thought-reading machine minds. 
	"So they - our commanders - told us. I have not seen it in action myself. I just know that the warning went for the machines of the west, and for being captured alone. Whatever means they have for it, it was heavily implied they don't even need you to be part machine yourself. They just need to [i]have [/i]you. So don't permit for any hostages to be taken." Quieter, he continued. "And don't let anyone return who might be suspected of having been captured, even if they seem [i]normal[/i]. Just shoot them on sight. Those were our orders."

	Gramps spoke of the upredictability of machine and the most probable courses of action by the two factions he knew best. 
	"Seems accurate enough," figured Enn. "I will note, though, that I haven't seen signs of Anderekians taking in people - unless they're literally too young to remember." [i]Don't ask me what they do with the adults. [/i]"Trenians ... maybe. They have entire civilian cities, after all. I don't [i]know[/i] for certain, but I suspect they would let people join, at the cost of being part of their war, too. Either would probably kill[i] me[/i], at least." 
	He hadn't left to die without a fight, so if they reconsidered and went that way, he'd have to take a separate path. Or fight. 
	"Even if I ditched all my equipment, at least the Anderekians would still be able to identify me up close. I could only walk away since whatever would permit my own former faction locate me out of sight would also light me up for the enemy. So really, they just couldn't always track us effectively, let alone when everyone else within kilometers was already dead, dying, or preoccupied with trying to not become one of the former. Truth to be told, I don't even know for certain if I'm the only former Anderekian currently in these forests. I did wonder if it was a deliberate suicide mission."  
	Enn's recounting seemed almost detached. It was interrogation. He was reporting. 

	[i]"We need to go south. It's our only chance.”[/i]
	Indeed. South. The only cardinal direction left that wasn't an apparently endless field of water for someone without sufficient water or air transport. 
	"If you intend to slip past anyone, doing so before the rising sunstorm has waned might be the only viable option. South... It is ... mostly swamplands and dunes that way, isn't it? But some paths should be passable by land vehicle, at least. I think there are humans there - non-machine humans - but I personally haven't had contact with them. The people here earlier ... they said you are a former trader? How much do you know about the south?" 

74:53:30 LNT