His words registered as vaguely Japanese-adjacent nonsense, half a step from being comprehensible, but their actual meaning seemed to drift into her skull regardless. It was an entirely different sensation to the other methods of direct meaning transmission that she had encountered on Zastreon. And yet… She had encountered it before, in Megacity Gamma. It was “glossolalia,” also called “tongues,” a psionic parlor-trick that allowed someone with developed psionics to “speak any language.” It was on the level of lifting and moving small objects, and therefore was one of the few psionic abilities common enough to have had a somewhat widely agreed-upon name in the megacity. He vaguely gestured towards the invisible giant, and the silvery metal blinding some of the corpses turned to liquid, darting across the ground and under the camo tarp. More and more she wanted to see what sort of walking tank was under there.
A few seconds later, the redhead turned his attention to Krahe. Entirely unknown star pattern, planetary megastructure, no signal, no spatial distortions. Stranger. You give off several distinct higher-dimensional energy signatures, yet nothing I recognize. No psionics, no bioenergy, no Primal Territory, yet it seems as if you have already developed a psychoid that overflows the physical body. This… I am not where I belong. It appears I have lost my way. Where am I?”
“The continent of Ashametan. Planet Zastreon. Year five-thousand thirty-nine After Banishment,” she said.
The red-haired young man brought out a compass-like device, brushing a few strands of hair aside. A piece of rubble from one of the statues floated into the air, shooting into his hand; his lifting of that piece seemed to disturb something, because all the others began crawling and tumbling back towards the structure, rejoining their rightful places, including the severed-yet-floating left arm. He placed it into a slot on the compass, and it came alive, a brass pointer rising from its surface, spinning for a few moments before it stabilized on a south-eastward direction. After scrutinizing the compass for a few seconds, he once more turned to Krahe and raised his arm to point, making it as obvious as humanly possible.
“What lays, let’s say, a week of travel in that direction?” he asked.
“Uninhabited wilderness full of supernatural beasts who are as dangerous and intelligent as they are valuable. Maybe a few hunter caravans, some ruins, don’t know,” she said honestly.
“A journey of a thousand miles a cripple, in a psi-hostile environment, full of equally hostile xenoforms, with no signal. Why would I get signal? Here? On an open planet? Get real. Perfect, fantastic, great,” he seethed again. With a deep breath, he said, almost apologetically: “Give me a moment.”
After pacing in front of the ruin’s entrance for a few moments, he walked up and, after a few attempts at “Ultima Thule,” he got the door to open. Angrily gesturing towards the Doorway into Nothing, he started openly shouting in anger: “Isn’t it a bit too early for tribulation? Huh? Couldn’t you just tell me this was your shortcut?! Since when have I not trusted your judgment?! What if I just decide I like it better here and go native, what then? First you tell me Tridacna Leviathan venom is “just a bit of a headache if you’re not careful” and now this?! Your mother, your sister, and all your female cousins, thrice a night, for ten years! I’m going to kill myself!”
As he ranted and raved, with each passing word and each growing degree of outpoured frustration, his hair began to float and strobe alight once again. By the end, he was wildly gesturing to-and-fro, telekinetically flinging rocks and pieces of rubble into the Pod, at the Doorway into Nothing. It all came to a head when he formed a gesture touching the tips of his right hand’s thumb and little finger together, creating a circle. With each furious knife-handed gesture, a darkly-iridescent speck shot out, accompanied by an oscillating whine as it flew. For some reason, perhaps because he failed to cause any actual damage, or perhaps because his attacks were directed at something that was “not part of the pod,” the pod didn’t retaliate as its door threatened.
It wasn’t long before he stopped this conniption fit; he stood in place breathing heavily for some time, and by the end he stood there in silence, staring into the pod, stone-still save for his raised left hand, feverishly touching the tip of his thumb to the other fingers in sequence, over and over. A gesture to aid with mental calculations, grown into a nervous tic. From this angle, it could be anyone’s guess whether the shape was a man or woman, putting his voice aside, at least. It wasn’t exactly macho baritone, but it was clearly-enough a male voice. Krahe could clock him based on his shoulders and the general shape of his bones, since at certain angles his ribcage slightly showed through that suit he wore, but noticing such small things and accurately clocking someone’s true nature based on them was half the reason she had survived for as long as she had in her past life.
Krahe eventually ran out of patience and spoke up.
“Are you done?”
He twitched in place, turning quickly to face her.
“Ah. Apologies for… That outburst. It has been a rough journey. I will speak plainly: You wouldn’t happen to be traveling in the same direction as I, would you? I can, of course, pay — by way of my services. I assume that merely my saying I am a puppetmaster doesn’t explain what services I can render or why they are valuable.”
Krahe just shook her head. At least it connected the dots on the peculiarities of his robot companions — they weren’t robots at all, but puppets.
“Of course. It wouldn’t be that easy,” he sighed. Reaching out an arm towards the dead cyborgs, he grasped the air. One of them lurched, then shuffled along the ground, until he gestured to toss it between them. Krahe could make out numerous mechanical components to the corpse, especially now that Barzai’s black salt had stripped back much of the skin and flesh. The dead man’s bones gleamed silver in the sun.