A series of slow, steady steps along the floor marked the ascent from the scuttlepod to the door of the brdige, where Jigsaw, Adari'a, and Cypress found themselves huddling against the bulkhead in short order. Jigsaw's ear was pressed against the metal, while the two larger predators held still, with pulse rifles clenched in their hands, their bodies all now in unsteady rythyms that made even the touch of each other too sensitive to bear.

"I'm hearing something . . ." Jigsaw spoke up. "Music. There's something playing in there."

Cypress raised an eyebrow, looking down at her furry comrade. "How come we can't hear it?"

"You think evolution gave me these ears for looks? Besides . . . we have to go in there at some point, if only to make sure we're not hurtling on some crash course for a star's gravity well or something."

"Wouldn't we have felt it if she did?" Adari'a frowned, moving to Jigsaw's side. "Unless she turned before doing all that acceleration, of course..."

"Doesn't matter." Jigsaw spoke again, bristling. "We have to get in there, have to fix her . . . this can't be her . . ."

Cypress glanced down. "Don't tell us you're too proud to admit she has a bug."

"Her coding should be sound!" Jigsaw groaned. "She's built on a solid system! You can't possibly blame me for this! Do you even remember how I made her?"

I certainly do . . .

"What the hell is going on in here?"

Jigsaw blinked, looking up from her screen to see Cypress marching towards Jigsaw, who had a robot's head in her lap as the Zillan came in closer. "Come on, you're acting like I'm committing a crime . . ."

"You're ruining the Mission Specialist my father was so gracious to give you and your fellow exterminators." Cypress remarked. "That robot was meant to give you a base of operations, not to be treated like a tinkertoy."

"Please, you expect me to use a robot that operates under Asimov's Laws?" Jigsaw snarled. "The bot's useless to me like that!"

"They're safety guidelines. We've already tweaked them to accept actions that allow them to let you harm others."

"Yeah? Well they're still no good to me." Jigsaw remarked, looking back at her work. "The whole reason they're even called Asimov's Laws is that he wrote so much about how often they failed. Only an idiot would code them into a system so strictly. I need, at minimum, a robot that understands the Principle of Mass."

Cypress blinked, as though stunned for a moment, before speaking up again. "But you're just as likely to break it with what you're doing!"

"I've already rewritten its core strategic functions and I'm currently giving the poor thing a personality that extends beyond 'Press one for directory assistance.' I know what I'm doing." Jigsaw remarked, slipping her fingers through the coding on the screen.

"Please. Since when did you become a genius in programming robots?"

"Did you even look at my vitae when I came here?" Jigsaw remarked. "I have a Bachelor's in Computer Science and some graduate level work to boot. I think I'm experienced enough to hack a robot."

Cypress paused, and then kneeled down. "Why'd you stop? Did you fail out of graduate school?"

"I received the offer in my third semester of graduate work to go on tour for the Veldin Philharmonic. I was supposed to go back after the tour, but . . . I came here instead."

"But don't you need a Masters to do anything? Especially in programming . . ."

Jigsaw smirked. "Programming is still enough of an art that 'equivalent experience' works too. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to compile my latest build."

Jigsaw poked at her screen once more, and the robot leapt out of Jigsaw's lap, standing up and walking to stand between Cypress and Jigsaw. The robot blinked its eyes, looking to try and figure out who was who, seeing their faces as though for the first time.

Cypress cast Jigsaw a glance, but Jigsaw just smiled, before uttering a few words in a tone so stilted, it was probably a code phrase. "Hello, world."

"Mother!" The robot piped up, speaking in a now-familiar, distinctly female tone. She sped over to Jigsaw, hugging her.

Jigsaw gave Cypress a knowing smirk. "See? Now that's the trick. You give the robot something she's meant to care about. If they treat all lives equally, then she's not going to let us take on forces that outnumber us. However, if you let her assign meaning to different lives . . . those certain lives become worth more to her. She'll become more willing to lead us to fight against hordes while taking extra care of me and my crew, because we'll have higher value to her. She'll be much more willing to let a stranger die than one of us, because the stranger means less to her."

Cypress raised an eyebrow. "And what about the rest of us on this ship?"

The Lombax shrugged. "When you start putting yourself in danger again, we'll find out, won't we?"

I'd rather not wait that long . . .

"Just . . . just get in there and deal with your own damned bot." Cypress snarled. "Last thing we need is to get sentimental over possessions."

A brief nod, and soon Jigsaw was primed to pounce in front of the door. "On three, okay?"

"THREE!" Adari'a barked, slamming a hand into the control panel, and the door split wide as Jigsaw bounded in first, followed by the mass of pink centaur, and finally Cypress, stepping inside to see Gangrel's doll body sitting in front of the bridge's main screen, as though hypnotized by it. The screen itself was merely covered in binary for now, but it was very much alive and bristling.

Forte snarled as she stood, moving to stand right behind Gangrel. Even now she seemed blissfully unaware, almost powered down.

Cypress looked around, noting the eerie 'dead' feeling in the room, before looking back at Jigsaw. Jigsaw noticed, and quickly took the lead to speak to 'her' machine. "Gangrel? You alive?"

The only response came out of the speaker grilles. "Affirmative."

This earned a blink out of the Lombax — Gangrel wasn't supposed to talk like that. "What's going on, Gangrel?"

"I am merely following orders." Gangrel remarked, again through the speakers. "Apparently I need to execute them again."

Jigsaw was about to respond, but was soon cut off by a shriek as Cypress darted off to one side, 'bound' by an invisible force. Adari'a went after her, but soon found herself pulled back, writhing against newfound pressure on her body. Jigsaw turned to see them, but soon found a now-familiar tightness around her chest that would have choked the breath out of her if she had any to speak of.

"You're supposed to be dead already!" Gangrel's doll body turned around, glaring at the trio. "I tried to neutralize the three of you in the least painful way possible, while you three were already asleep, and this is this thanks I get? The NERVE of you people!"

"You tried to kill us!" Adari'a growled, coughing immediately afterwards.

The doll raised an eyebrow. "Well doing it while you were awake and having to watch each other die would have just been cruel . . . but if you insist, I can do things that way too. Who wants to go first?"

"Stop this . . . NOW . . ." Jigsaw seethed, shutting her eyes to focus, and her fur starting to shimmer with nano as it came to the surface of her skin.

"But you said not to stop!" Gangrel whined, fluttering into the air a bit. "So I'm not, and that's that! Your orders, I'm following them, you die!"

"What?" Cypress barked, almost shouting it out as she tried to resist the now-crushing pressure on her from Gangrel's fine-tuning of the gravity in the room.

Jigsaw's eyes, however, were wide in disbelief. "I never gave any such orders!"

"Yes you did!" Gangrel barked back. "You just gave them to me a few hours ago, remember?"

"No, I didn't!" Jigsaw growled again, the nano on her fur flying off . . . only to be countered by the intense gravity that was centering now around her, making it hard to move and harder still to defend herself.

Gangrel frowned, noting her captain's own petulance with disgust. "I thought you wanted this . . . you're not making this any easier on me, Captain . . . This is really hard for me . . ."

Jigsaw looked up at Gangrel, and noticed for the first time that there was hesitation drawn into Gangrel's face. Was she trying to send her a message? Did she actually regret what she was trying to do?

"I know you may be having second thoughts, but I'll make them go away in a few minutes." Gangrel spoke, with her lips pursing tight. "I don't want to do this, but your orders were clear . . . please . . . Ku'vou, Vox . . . Captain . . . listen to me . . ." Gangrel cried out again, her voice wavering, as though beginning to crack. "Just hold still. Stop resisting. I can make it painless."

Jigsaw struggled to look up, but then glanced down, as if in defeat, before slowly bowing forward, offering her head. She loudly heard Cypress mentally shouting NO! and Adari'a sending out waves of disbelief, but then Jigsaw spoke up. "Before you do anything else . . . I still deserve a last request, Gangrel. You owe me that."