So, this idea has been bothering me, and I figured it was better to share than to leave it alone. Featuring a hypothetical future Motoko with 20s across the board, perks out the wazoo, and a custom-built and personally upgraded Gemini frame.

Ghost Over the Horizon

Motoko cursed as she looked around. Her optics and various sensors had checked and rechecked her surroundings enough times that she was sure they were real, even though it should have been an impossible sight. A vibrant forest, teeming with life. Squirrels and rabbits, goats and boars. Fish swimming in a crystal clear stream. All stretching as far as the eye could see.

It was beautiful, and there wasn't any place like it within a thousand miles of Night City. There probably wasn't anywhere like this left on the planet at all.

Which meant she probably should have taken that insane ranting about "removing her from the face of this world forever" more seriously.

Hiromi was going to kill her. Motoko was definitely going to miss dinner.

OoOoO

Aloy checked her Focus when she heard the sounds of fighting. She expected to spot a hunter bringing down a target, or maybe an unlucky traveling merchant under attack. Maybe bandits, though that wasn't likely after she and Nil had cleared out the camp at Devil's Thirst the other day. Instead, she found something altogether more unusual.

It was a single person facing off against a whole group of corrupted machines. Which, to be fair, was something she'd done herself on more than one occasion at this point, but Aloy had always approached from stealth, laid traps, and used the environment to her advantage (even if sometimes things did get more hectic than she'd originally planned).

Instead, Aloy watched as the stranger openly shouted a challenge, then laughed and taunted her way through the fight as she casually dismantled the machines with her bare hands. And she looked odd under the augmented vision of her Focus. Attempts at scanning just returned errors or corrupted entries, but it seemed more like her Focus was trying to build a threat analysis like the stranger was a machine, not another person.

Even if it didn't look like her help was strictly necessary, Aloy had to admit that she wanted to know more. Nocking an arrow, she targeted the Signal Relay that would call in reinforcements.

Hopefully the stranger would be up for a talk after the fight was over.

OoOoO

Meeting Aloy had been a stroke of luck, Motoko reflected. She was smart and strong and determined, and also had the gene print necessary to unlock the doors that hid all sorts of goodies. Didn't understand how to act around other people much, but that was understandable after Motoko unlocked Aloy's backstory, and she was a quick learner besides. Just stubborn.

She couldn't help much with Motoko's goal of getting back home to her family (Jun, Hiromi, the rest of Section 9), not directly anyways, but "reboot the world-spanning AI who reseeded life after the apocalypse and see if she can help" made for a good Plan B, and Aloy was definitely needed for that, so Motoko had to stick around. Besides, Aloy got them into the best situations.

Like standing between a city of mostly innocent souls and an endless army of genocidal machines.

This had all the hallmarks of the climatic final battle, so Motoko had decided not to hold back in her preparations. She made her own modifications to Petra's explosive cannons, adding a toggle switch that swapped between the default charge and release burst to a steady auto-fire grenade launcher. Not to mention her own EMP and electronic warfare traps that would sow chaos amongst the enemy machines.

But what Motoko was most proud of was also what had the rest of their allies keeping their distance. Thunderjaws weren't set up with a bio-pod conversion, obviously, as far as Motoko could tell, they hadn't really been a thing before the end of the world on this Earth, so she couldn't just plug and play. And even if she could, the sensors and inputs had never been designed for a human brain in mind, so trying would likely just result in driving her insane if it didn't fry her brain outright.

Fortunately, Aloy's override tech was much more easily adapted into a remote control piloting system, so even if Motoko hadn't actually swapped out of her Gemini and into the Thunderjaw, it certainly felt like it. All the fun with no risk to her essential systems, see Hiromi, she could learn!

Weapons bristling, Motoko charged the oncoming army. "Raaaaaaawrrrrrrrr, I'm a motherfucking t-rex!"