Al grinned. The transfer of language knowledge seemed to be proceeding pretty smoothly. He found himself thinking back to his first language lessons. It had been a quick matter of programming, back then. His original chassis... it had been a long time since he'd moved on. Funny how he still missed it on occasion. An alloy of tungsten, sylaclysm, and a carbon fibrous weave had been the main materials. He remembered... it had been almost a work of art, as it should have been, he supposed. Lovingly hand-crafted, an unbelievably complex meshing of mechanical and electrical, designed for no purpose other than to more effectively get his groove on.
His mind was wandering... why was he finding it so hard to concentrate...?
He remembered his first jump to another universe... He'd been drinking and dancing for days, to the point that he could barely stand up. The party looked like it was going to continue, probably- Furka events tended to go that way- but all he really wanted to do at that point was go home and lie down. Unfortunately, the valet had refused to let him drive, so he'd made his way back to the celebration, hoping to find some place out of the way to rest. It was there that he'd passed someone he recognized- a human, a taller, well-built man with pretty obvious Asian heritage. They'd been introduced by his good friend Cessieda once before. The man seemed to prefer a different name than he had when they'd been introduced, but he was still good for conversation. After a while, Al thought to ask if maybe the man was going his way. It turned out he was, so they'd boarded his spaceship. Al had thought it odd that a human would be flying a Mauselean ship, but had also thought he might be just a little too drunk to care. He must have dozed, because the next thing he knew, the world was spinning, turning upside down. His head was in no state to handle this... apparently the man had been "found." He was being pursued by who-knows-what for the theft of something-or-other, but he'd been in worse scrapes before. If Al had been an organic at that point, he might have thrown up. Instead he just held on, as the world seemed to melt away around them, until the pursuers, the ship, even the blackness beyond just disappeared. When the world snapped back into place, alarms were blaring, and Al was nothing if not confused. The man at the controls was freaking out just a bit too much, he thought- surely it couldn't be that hard to figure out where they were...
Al looked down at the device in his hand. It was getting feedback information from the suit... a request for additional data... which it was transmitting to Al... and he couldn't seem to resist it... everything running through his head was being transmitted directly to the suit...
He remembered... not long ago... receiving a request from Salem to prepare a stock of Malleon to fit into a dart that Salem could fire... at Corliss' ship. The Malleon... a swarm of microbes who, between them, were able to build a collective consciousness... they fed on energy... and could manipulate matter... they existed throughout Salem's ship... they could repair damage and maintain systems... those loaded into the dart had been nervous... they'd been aboard the Skimmer... but most of them not for long... they'd been found out... and Salem had had to remove the Malleon... but he'd left a few... dormant... in case he'd needed a later advantage...
Al finally managed to turn off the tech-bridger device, and collapsed to his hands and knees, panting. Overriding external commands... it was something he hadn't had to do in ages... certainly not in this body.
He shook his head and glanced sidelong at the suit. "Would have been nice if you'd asked," he choked out after a moment.
Salem smirked at Rathien and nodded at the communicator. "That's kind of the question here, isn't it?" he asked the woman on the other end of the microphone. "Who am I, that I can track you down? If I can do it, others probably can too, right? That's part of what I'd like to discuss. Luckily, this poor trader's on your side. We might be able to..." how would Captain Pienterre have phrased it? "open a mutually beneficial dialogue."
