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Oh, look. Another new person appearing out of nowhere and staring at Wyn. (She's starting to get sick of that reaction, to be honest.) "Hi." she says, looking up and lifting a hand in greeting to the new girl, then immediately returns to picking specks of dried paint off of her sleeve.

"I see. Well, it's nice to have fun I suppose."

Her downtime was spent doing space pirate observations. Totally not bitter about that, nope.

Motoko did not smile. But then, that was hardly surprising given the circumstances, and herself. As a queen overlooks her domain— or a wolf the sheep's pen— Motoko looked out over the village.

"So, this is Sheeana," She mused, low and idle, "Your home, isn't it?"

The Fremen did not fail to notice the inappropriately dressed outfreyn woman surveying them haughtily.

"It is my village on Rakis, the planet I grew up on. Though that building is a learning hall from Chapterhouse." She took Motoko's arm and led her up towards it. There was pain to these memories, but she was very, very good at hiding it.

It wasn't that Motoko was unaware of their disapproving stares, it was that she utterly failed to care. Dress had little to do with it— Motoko was neither overheated, nor sweating, nor would she be for some time if the readouts had any accuracy to them. Full-body replacement Cyborgs do not lose water.

Deliberately, but without force, Motoko took her arm back. Even if she hadn't a cultural aversion to unnecessary contact, she hardly enjoyed being led along like a child.

I must not facepalm. Facepalming is the mindkiller...Oh you sophisticated one, cyborg and enforcer, you understand but you do not understand. Sheeana had no wish to find out what the consequences of a fight between a powerful cyborg and a troop of desert warrior-tribesmen inside her brain would be.

"Won't you please come inside, my honored guest? Our village is a humble one, boasting only a small Bene Gesserit outpost to distinguish it, but still you must be tired from your journey and would enjoy some spicecoffee and baklawa, no?" There. That ought to have gotten the message across.

One of these things is not like the others...

There is one window which seems...out of place.

Not that the haphazardly placed windows really have much place, but this one seems even more odd.

It seems to show absolutely nothing behind it. Only black...or white...or perhaps some odd shade of gray. It's rather difficult to tell. The mind can be a rather nebulous place, after all...

"If I was, I probably would have noticed by now," Roxie says, in the same calm, dry tone she always uses.

"Thank you, I'd appreciate it," the polite reply— almost demure. Even Motoko can see when social backpedaling was in order, even if she was only engaging in it out of perverse desire to see Sheeana squirm.

Following the woman across the burning sand she eased her step, moving more surely at software and experience adapted her step to remove the awkwardness that had been wrought. Motoko cursed her lack of external memory, but kept her expression serene. What a strange place.

Tess moves with a kind of rough grace that suggests much more natural aptitude than actual training or experience. And she lets out a little bit of a laugh at that, half-suppressed, as she moves to follow Sheeana.

The cloak is almost all white now, shining a little iridescently in the dim light.

Thank Shai-Halud.

Inside the school was a psuedo-religious place, imitating a humble country church in its architecture. There were no rows of pews though. Candles, yes, but no shrines. Women in black robes sat and talked, practiced martial arts that caused them to blur, read, conversed. Sheeana too took one of the robes from a hook on the wall and threw it over her stillsuit. "This is a Bene Gesserit building, like where I had my classes on Chapterhouse."

The Major took in all this with a glance, filing it automatically in her buffer for later reexamination. The religions of earth had never held her interest for longer than it took to disprove what of their faith Motoko might have held precious. The architecture faintly touched that, some forgotten memory, but it was nothing and she deleted the process that was feeding nostalgia into her consciousness without a qualm.

But there was one thing that needed comment, "Always women?"

"... it was a joke," Roxie says. Her sense of humor is just weird.

She looks over at the teacher and then back at Yuri, deciding to ignore the former.

"We have had men within our organization, but in all history only two men have been able to access Other Memory, becoming Reverend Mothers...Or Fathers, you might say." She made a sweeping gesture. "These are Reverend Mothers from various points in my past."

'We have merged with many intelligences, along the way...'

And why did that line spring to mind? The voice of the puppeteer's dying self was haunting as he merged and separated, whirling away into nothingness even as they linked, dragging Motoko with him. But that was only memory, and none of it showed on her face, only in the way she hesitated before speaking.

"I've always found gender to be irrelevant," she murmured in reply, following or seeming to follow Sheeana's directional gesture.

This door was a circular portal made of a sand-scoured copper with thin aquamarine triangles ringing its frame. It was old and the metal was warm to the touch, but not too warm--like a nice cup of something hot on a cold day. The door itself opened in a spiral, and the soft whoosh of air was heavily scented with the bitter cinnamon scent of spice melange and an odd ozone tang that was faintly metallic at the back of one's throat.

There was something clean about it. Clean and calm and quiet, but beneath that, there was fire.

This was an odd place. Everywhere there was sand and rock. Stone trees were adorned with rustling, glowing aquamarine crystal leaves that shone brilliantly in the sunlight. Their light pooled in bright refracted blues that glittered across sand and the polished twisting rocks. Shapes, endless shapes, drifted within the forest of rock and crystal. Here and there one might catch a glimpse of a face, a smile across the lips of an old woman, a younger one, fleeting laughter, even deep discussion.

A glowing line threaded its way from trung to trunk, glittering and humming as it wound through the forest. At the center, the very dead center, was a most curious sight. A massive tree of light and rock had erupted like some sort of strange fountain, its roots threaded and twisted within the sand and rock. It was thick, massive, even, and its trunk was a braided mix of both light and worn rock. Coiled around the base of this tree was a massive Shai-Hulud. Sandtrout swam in a sand pool, swirling the surface of reddish sand as they moved.

It was here that Arha Masaari sat, her face upturned, bathing in the light of the tree, with a sandtrout and a swirl of sand suspended a few inches in the air, hovering over her palm.

Edited 2009-11-07 05:49 (UTC)

Puppeteer's words would probably prove more relevant after some thought later. For the moment, Sheeana just took the hiccup in her speaking rythms as a sign of discomfort in unfamiliar sorroundings.

"It's relevant in a biological way." She said as she she motioned to a nearby table. A mug of hot spicecoffee (it smelled of flint and cinnamon) and flaky, sweet baklawa had been set out for them. "The Spice Agony kills almost every man who attempts it. I wasn't jesting with the offer of refreshments by the way."

Hey, that window wasn't there before. It slides open, and Satori pokes her head in, looking kind of annoyed and not at all fitting the mood of the room.

"Do you think you could get some light in here? Or at least some color. It's throwing off the ambience of my whole room."

A biological way that they'd already established as irrelevant for a cyborg's needs. Motoko considered the hot drink without touching it, examining her options as intently as one might when staring at a bear trap, then took up the drink smoothly in one hand and drank.

The taste spread smoothly over her tongue, chocolate and mint tea, bitter somehow— a mixed sensation, and even as the chemical composition analysis scrolled across her vision Motoko jerked back and looked at the drink as if it'd delivered an electric shock.

Sheeana was in a blur and next to the other woman almost immediately. "Forgive me, I hadn't considered what effect Spice would have on you. Are you alright?"

"I can taste it," Motoko replied, not taking her eyes of the dangerous, intimate drink. Unperturbed the Spice-infused tea continued it's gentle steaming, "Visceral sensation."

The chem stats had faded, but she called them up again— there was nothing in this that should have garnered that reaction, no flavor locked in biochemical memory to evoke the visceral sensation of taste. Heat and texture...she might assign it the memory of tea, but it was taking on partial memory patterns of itself.

"It should be impossible."

Sheeana sat at the humble, rickety chair across from her. Motoko, despite her cyborg nature was behaving much like anyone else taking the drug for the first time. "That you can taste it or that it should have an effect on you? Spice makes many things possible that previously weren't."

...and it was gone, shuttered away under that cold exterior, the surprise gone from her face entirely. As if forgotten, Motoko set the drink aside.

"Generally speaking, a cyberized individual isn't capable of tasting new things. The sensory memories previous to the surgery are preserved, but the actual sensation of taste is muted and comes across more as chemical analysis than anything else," She explained as clinical and dry as a textbook. Something she'd never before tasted shouldn't have been anything more than numbers telling the ingredients, "It's probably just a byproduct of the hack."

"Spice always tastes like your most beloved food. It's theorized that this is your body telling you to eat more of it." She took her own mug and sipped, felt a number of flavors that managed to not clash: pastries from the market at Keen, fish soup at Chapterhouse (the first time she'd tasted any kind of seafood), protein bars after a hard workout. "Hack? How have I cut you?" She asked bemusedly, for that was the ancient meaning of the word and she was completely ignorant of the computorial meaning.

She almost wanted to smile, too-raw for her own liking after even a sip of Spice. Motoko folded her arms and explained curtly, "It's also a term denoting the fact that I'm currently accessing a brain not my own. Usually it's applied towards computers."

Sheeana's expression was pleasured, fraught with the sensation of taste. The newness and vulnerability of such an emotion had caught Motoko off guard, "I guess I should just be grateful I can still feel this way."