like black and white styrene on a dramatic night

we might say that it does recall a bit of sanc_sound

"I must say, I am rather curious about that enormous golden Mechon."

"Look at him, without a care in the world," said Reyn to Sharla, sidelong, his tone rather disgusted. He kicked the snow with greater vigor to voice and display his vehement, visceral, vitriolic disagreement. "Dunban, what the hell are you playing at? That was Mumkhar back there!"

"Indeed." Pulled from relative reverie back to polite conversation, Dunban repurposed the finger that had been lightly touching his lips to stroke his chin, the picture of sagacity. "And crafty as he is, he did not come upon his beloved powerful body all on his lonesome. Of that much I am sure."

"Well sure, okay, so Mumkhar's no mechanical whiz. I guess we always kinda figured that. But still-"

"We always thought of the Mechon as monsters. Killers - unintelligent." If Reyn had expected Dunban to take pause at his minor dig directed toward Mumkhar's departed and mechanized buttocks, he was served a shallow surprise. "Lacking even the personality to be cowards. But if they had an intelligent creator..."

"If he's so intelligent, how come he's been ordering them all to kill us for as long as anybody can remember?"

The sharpshooter's eruption caused even Reyn to check himself; close as they had become, Melia and Riki yet remained outsiders to the unique and personal, boots-on-the-ground plight of the Homs. High Entia, especially those royal, were disciplined not to show anger in outburst, and indeed to be conciliatory and apologetic when they did not have overriding information to hand. And Nopon...only dinobeasts of the Deinos and Sauros varieties were very often concerned with the murder of furballs.

Sharla sighed. "I'm sorry, Dunban, I don't mean to snap at you. But they're scrap, is what they are. They are mindless machines. You know that as well as any of us."

But Dunban himself was none shaken by this. If anything, he was mildly bemused. It would be impossible to tell whether Sharla's reflexive apology truly had been warranted based solely on the reaction of he for which it had been intended.

He smiled a bit, just privately, caught in the throes of his ineffable sightseeing-tour train of logic. "And if I'm right? It can't hurt to assume our enemy is tougher than it's been letting on."

Now hand to hip. Now easy nod for acknowledgement.

"When you put it that way, I suppose it's not a bad thought," conceded Shulk. "Who knows how many of the rest of them are actually people we used to know?"

Always, against the backdrop of the war, it had been that people died, not so much as disappeared. Supposing Mumkhar's demise had been more of a dramatical fade to black, as he was absconded with by crafty unreal vultures scoping him with their ever-droning laser pointers - these would be Mechon who didn't so much feed, feast or fete upon their prey but instead figurated them into friezes made to mock what once were Bionis's leg-dwellers.

"You're saying you think there's a person inside?" Of Yaldabaoth, that was.

"Doubtless, Melia. There were people inside the other...faced Mechon, were there not?"

"Yes, but those were Homs," insisted Sharla. "How can the leader of Mechonis be a person?"

(In detail, to avoid elision: how can the leader of Mechonis be a Homs, or a High Entia, or even a Nopon; how can this as-yet-unheard-of personage resemble any sentient and sans-hostile creature seen to date? How can the leader of the opposing Titan not indeed resemble its infinite infantrythings most completely in make?)

"Well," said Dunban. By now he was nearing professorial. "It's so that one doesn't necessarily need to be a person to be a leader. Packs of Volff and Feris have a social hierarchy, for example. They communicate via their vocalizations, pheromones and mating behaviors. And then there are the Tirkins. We might reasonably liken Mechon to animals, in such a way."

"Mechanical animals," repeated Shulk, because he rather liked the sound of it.

"Indeed, Shulk. Now, the Face Mechon, as such, are rather more...hominid, shall we say. They have limbs, manually operated weapons. They have, well, faces. We haven't yet seen Mechon who might be compatible with the cockpit of such an artillery unit. But we have only seen those Mechon built for war."

"Riki thought all Mechon built for war!"

"That may be so. It may not." Despite his granting words, it seemed that Dunban was more in the camp of not, however. "Have we all determined to ignore the fact that that golden Mechon spoke to us?"

(And it did not speak in the tongue of Nopon.)

"He said his name, too. Egil..."

A stray spark of amusement played in Dunban's eye as he witnessed Shulk, too, being momentarily captivated by the strange new name - but, then, Shulk was generally prone to momentary captivations.

"You've never met a Mechon with a name, have you?"

Never seen, one might say - never fought. But Dunban said, met. Shulk thought of how he might scurry up to an abandoned, atrophied M69 unit and offer to shake its hand so hardily that the joint section buckled right off. He thought of his more ginger approaches, toward optical units not yet determined to be fully defunct. He thought of how eagerly he had met the Mechon who attacked the colony, with the Monado in his spasming hands.

Right. Mechon with names. "Just model numbers. We don't even differentiate them by species the way we would with the animals of the Bionis. We assume their ranks are related to size, too..."

Aside, Melia tugged on the pointy couter at Sharla's elbow. "Are they...will they just go on like this all evening, if we don't say anything?"

Sharla smiled. "Of course they will. They'll keep walking, though. Just make sure to nudge them in the right direction. Used to be they'd wade right into the marsh without thinking."

It had taken all he had for Dunban to cast aside his carefully practiced and cultivated nonchalance in order that he might attempt to marshal Fiora, trapped in the silver Face Mechon, by way of his best strident big brother warnings.

He tried his best to make it all about Shulk. He didn't want the spotlight on him. He wasn't like Mumkhar. Sometimes, in the moment, it was gratifying to garner attention; to flash and be flashy, to amass a reputation. But he wasn't hardly so dramatic a hero.

He was easily distractible, for one thing. His great diatribe about the true nature of the gold Face Mechon had been little more than idle curiosity, which at the time did serve to focus the broader group on their goal.

Yes, Apocrypha this, Monado that, Fiora this, Alvis that. It was Egil he remained most interested in. It was Egil's stilted, filtered voice that he attuned to. It was the palpable, hazy aura of Egil's presence that flooded his vision. It was the surging green lights in Egil's mask that he absorbed. It was the flight of Egil's Face that he tracked as the two opposing mechs stanced for battle.

"Who would ever submit to you?!" cried Shulk. Dutifully, Dunban chimed in with the spirited reminder to "Forget about him. We have to get out of here." And then he went right back to staring at Egil until Shulk needed strong-armed reassurance once again.

Maybe it was the utter lack of cowardice, seeing as Mumkhar had had so much. Maybe it was the bizarre and unshakeable sense of decorum and conviction, seeing as Dickson had had so little. Maybe it was the sheer power that Egil exuded - not that he was in charge of the Mechonis, but that he did it so well.

These were thoughts absolutely unvoiceable, seeing as they flew so swift in the face of their current and overarching quest to free Fiora and the Bionis, if not Shulk and the Monado, from the tyranny of centuries. But Dunban kept them in his pocket as well as he kept the bits of styrene he found on the factory floor, thinking of how wretched and greasy they seemed amongst all the mechanical sheen.

He had been low of brow and harsh of surprise, when Linada and her cohort had appeared. But of course, his first thought had been...if these are Machina, then what is Egil? If Linada is cool and calculating, then are all Machina simply this enigmatic?

His anger...not entirely performative, no, but dubiously posed in reaction to himself, that he might not in truth think these screeds against attack as naturally.

When he sees Miqol, he mentions Egil, and foolishly asks if Miqol knows him. It's a juicy reward, the key detail, but it doesn't figure well for what this Egil must look like. Then there's Egil's sister, Vanea. She's beautiful, as women generally seem to be. When the rest of the party greet her, Dunban remains silent.

He must know, eventually. He will know. He will understand what it takes to command such presence and yet not care at all for doing so or what comes of it. He will know these anti-awkward ways. And if they truly must kill Egil...

Well. They killed Mumkhar and survived to tell the tale of his precedent-setting pettiness. Better to have loved and lost.

igor bring out the compilation.

[1] [2] [3]

yes sir.