[hr][CENTER][h2][color=d7e0df]Shoshiku (初試究 – “First Trial”) | [s] Mable Smith [/s][/color][/h2][/CENTER][hr]Shoshiku entered the room 49 seconds before the meeting was scheduled to start, reasoning based on the observed approaches of the other gang members that entering early was unlikely to be considered rude, and in fact, might even be expected of them by virtue of yet another one of the countless unspoken rules the AI had yet to identify or decipher. 

Adjusted their sensory processing Shoshiku took in the clubhouse lobby; the meeting space wasn’t crowded per se, but it was by no means empty either, and there were certainly more than enough people present to produce a constantly changing information landscape. Cybernetic eyes flickered along set paths, pre-calculated to optimise data collection, updating their trajectories every so often as new data was added and accounted for.

Biological eyes didn’t exactly view the world with anything like a framerate, but the same couldn't be said for the majority of optical cybernetics, including the ones through which Shoshiku perceived the world. To any normal person lacking sufficient mental augmentations with which to process the information, the difference may as well be nonexistent for all but the slowest of optics, but for those capable of parsing each and every frame in a fraction of the time it took to receive, the difference became something of a frustrating limitation. Worse still the particular model of cyber-eye the host had installed featured onboard processing and further had to pass through their organic mind before Shoshiku could access it, factors that together introduced a latency to any visual processing the AI received that could sometimes stretch into the hundreds of milliseconds.

To compensate for and mitigate this issue, the AI had needed to fundamentally alter the way they perceived their environment, processing information not as a constant flow of data as would be ideal but in discrete packets from which simulations could be run to infer the missing information.

It was in this way that Shoshiku observed Michiko waving them over – a gesture the AI recognised only for it having been used on and explained to them multiple times in the past, as opposed to any contextual understanding of why the motion meant what it meant. 

The AI considered waving back or producing some other such gesticulation, but decided against it after a couple seconds of calculation; Shoshiku estimated a high probability that failing to gesture back would be rude – which would be "bad" – but without adequately understanding the semantics behind the gestures involved, doing so anyway ran the risk of accidentally telling a lie and while the AI knew that a lie was only usually "bad" and could even be "good" given the right context, they also knew that lies could rise to the level of "unforgivably bad" which wasn’t an acceptable risk.

Instead, Shoshiku approached the Zero-Percenter and offered her a verbal greeting in lieu of a somatic one. [color=d7e0df]"Hello, I greet Michiko, intending to not be rude."[/color]

With that out of the way, Shoshiku promptly sat their host’s body down on the sofa alongside Michiko and Frost, letting what muscles the action rendered unnecessary go limp immediately after, settling in to wait patiently as the meeting started and the missions were explained.

When Tsuki asked whether anyone had any questions Shoshiku simply gave a slight nod of their head, which meant yes. 

They had lots of questions and concerns, including some new ones about both the missions that had just been explained. Shoshiku calculated a decent probability of it being these questions that Tsuki was actually asking for, but at the same time, the AI had also heard it was bad to answer questions with questions and they'd been assured the Kurotori wouldn't ask them to do bad things, so probably not.