cipher @NeonCipherPhantom@cybre.space

"Feels weird as all hell, moving forwards."

"Don't get cute."

i made a bot live in my brain for thousands of hours and this is what i got

Thick clouds swirl overhead, threatening an end to their brief reprieve from the worst of the rain.

Time to move.

Prior week's snow melts into white-gray sludge, squelching underfoot. Empty bag crumpled and discarded, quickly lost among the other detritus. A perpetual menace, even in the more affluent districts of Sprawl-6.

"A Barbershop." Cardea has nothing if not a penchant for stating the obvious. "Do I need a haircut?"

"Yes."

"But that's not why we're here."

"No."

CRUNCH.

Crunch.

Cardea was never this loud of an eater before.

"Stop what?"

"You're chewing as loudly as possible, just to annoy me."

A taped fist opens and closes in the bag of crisps, an unholy combination of ASMR video and deleted special effects scene from a Sci-Fi horror.

Demonstrably worse.

Cardea lifts her shoulders in a loose shrug, shifts her weight on the bench.

"You can't prove that."

"Can you stop that?"

CRUNCH.

Crunch.

CRUNCH.

Crunch.

CRUNCH.

Seven years ago that November.

Taped fists collide with synthleather, bone and sineu and bag competing to determine which gives way first.

Rattling chain as the bag gives. Cardea weaves, guard up, jab. Leading hook. Into straight.

Pauses, if only to scrape her fringe out of her eyes.

It's been a while since she's tied a braid.

Thwap.

Thwap.

Thwap Thwap.

Thwap.

the fate of all tools is to be chipped away at and made indistinct

Seven years ago that November Nicole paces the length of her office, nervous drags from an espresso-flavoured vape permeating the poorly-ventilated room with a dense layer of smog.

It was a voicemail that started it. Four seconds of audio on loop on her brain and on her loudspeaker, rattled off with each step.

"Eight-Nineteen. Eight-Nineteen. Eight-Nineteen."

"Another government job?"

Cardea-Not-Careful decided, apparently, to finally read the briefing.

Cipher huffs, wiping a tissue against her nostrils.

No blood.

Window rolled up. Key turns, engine roars back to life.

"Governer job. One of the candidates, anyway."

"We don't play politics."

"We don't play ethics. Everything is politics."

"King's Gambit. I remember."

Cipher blinks once, then twice.

"Since when did you remember the King's Gambit?"

Cardea-Not-Careful lifts her shoulders in a resigned shrug. Cipher glances down to the netbook and lights up in realisation.

Tongue bit to stifle a laugh, hard enough for blood to well in her mouth.

Glue and glucose, mixed with copper. Sicklysweet.

"Doorkeeper." Auged eyes glimmer over a wiki page, divining some astrological meaning from the name Cardea-Not-Careful chose at random. "Or the main street of a city. The Romans used religious rites to align terrestrial and celestial space."

"It's a lot less impressive when I can see you googling it." Cipher decides, finishing the soft drink and rolling down the window to toss the bottle out onto the pavement beside them, to fester with the other detritus.

Taste of wet glue fills Cipher's mouth, and she pulls over the car. Rattling tablets swallowed with a flat bottle of crystal pepsi from the driver's side door cupholder.

Careful-Not-Careful sounds up list of mythological names bears fruit.

"Cardea."

Cardea-Not-Careful nods once, then again, spindly fingers filling the name into the dot-gov form.

Cipher staunches the Bleeding enough to retort.

"Pretentious."

"Says 'Cipher'."

"Says 'Hinge'."

Several immediately discarded, either because they rolled off the tongue poorly or because they evoked old family pets.

It is, at this point, that Cipher determines she needs a better designation for this new incarnation than 'Careful-Not-Careful', because she is clearly wrestling with a very different beast.

Careful-Not-Careful likely agrees, because the tab with the tripping Cheetah is discarded as soon as she grows bored of tormenting Cipher in favor of a name meanings site, and she sits sounding out the syllables to select a suitable name for herself.