"To you as well! And as long as you're worrying about traveling, definitely avoid the dark castle." He points at the only castle visible. "Can't miss it. But it's dangerous to even get close because of the Guardians."

"Are there active ones in that direction? What's their range?"

"Yes, lots of hunting Guardians. Flying ones too... I'm not sure anyone has measured it. Close enough to shout would be too close, as a guess. Take care!" The traveler resumes his walk towards the swamp.

And Naomi continues on her path. She needs to find a good spot to go into VR, so she can go further afield in the Matrix than a hundred meters and actually find the things. It's too bad that she would probably break an arm trying to climb up a tree. Or up a cliff.

There's a nice, almost stair-like rock formation a ways down the slope she could hide on top of. There are purple flowers on it.

... Convenient. She does that, sits in a familiar cross-legged pose, rests her back against the face of the cliff, and enters VR. Her body slumps backwards, but, caught by the cliff-face, her body doesn't tumble down.

Meanwhile her mind is racing through a systematic matrix perception action that will let her see where the Guardians are. If she's right and they have access to the matrix, anyway. 

This is still a big swathe of countryside. She has to go for a while.

...As her perception nears the shrine by that wide river that flows here, there is some kind of system - there. It's not doing anything. Wait, a sudden burst of activity, a jittering series of unanswered pings, and then it is silent again.

Her persona creeps close to it. Carefully. Is she spotted?

Apparently not. It continues its occasional... Scan? Checkin? Not reacting to her.

It looks... Damaged. Bits of the sturdy, imposing Persona flicker, or are entirely missing.

Huh. She does a more thorough scan of it. Is there anything that would prevent her from getting marks?

No. Though it really does look like some parts of it are probably not working correctly...

Yeah, she's not planning on adopting it, she just wants to see how it works. It's probably safer to start with a broken one anyway, since it might be missing some security things.

She gets a mark and goes in. Does it have any information on what it's supposed to be able to do?

There's a... Control panel. Plain and obvious by the standards of these things.

Guardian 14524

Status: Guard mode. No threats engaged recently.

The rest is fuzzed out or broken.

... huh. She leaves and returns to her body, checking to make sure nothing's happened in the minutes it took her to do her search.

The herd of horses has moved on. That traveler is a small speck in the distance now.

No monsters, though. Good.

She rests for ten minutes and admires the scenery. Then she dives back in, looking for a functional Guardian.

To find a more functional Guardian takes a lot longer, involves getting closer to the castle.

There's one. Its scan/ping/whatever is as unanswered as the damaged one's was.

She gets close and stakes it out. Is it in range of any of the others? She's not sure how it determines hostiles but a change of ownership might set one of them off. 

This one doesn't seem to be in range of other Guardians. It roves over a fairly wide area, though, perhaps a mile or so. Seems to be on a hill.

She picks a time in its rounds when it's most isolated from the other Guardians or from possible bystanders. Then she goes in. One mark, two marks, three --

Control Device. 

There's a moment of startup screen -

Guardian 2742 Direct control

Power Core: OK

Sensors: OK

Weapon: OK

Mobility: OK

- And then she's looking through its frontal camera, down a pretty, grassy hill and toward a patch of woods. No sound feed. A targeting reticle is prominent.

That looks like a monster over there, just kind of sitting with a wooden spear. Like some giant deformed Orc. It has a blue overlay in the Guardian's sight.

... it's so weird for there to be no oversight against doing this indefinitely. Back home the Grid Overwatch Division would make her reboot every 20 seconds, or else fry her device. Here she can pick at settings at her leisure.

She really wants to kill the monster. But she should probably wait to do that. She's not sure whether anyone's paying attention, but it pays to be paranoid. Instead, she pilots it to a landmark she'll be able to find later.

Ultimately she wants to change ownership of the Guardian from ... whoever the current owner is ... to her. Ideally without letting anyone know the ownership has been changed. She looks through the files on receiving and sending comms and duplicates them, saving one version to her deck. She'll analyze them and make dummy versions later.

More urgently, she needs to find out how to render it harmless it in a way that she can trivially repair. (Her interim solution to this is to shut it down, but she's not sure whether that'll stand up to an external reboot.) Meanwhile she copies its targetting system so she can use its autopilot settings instead of piloting it remotely.

With two projects to work on, she jacks out.

The Guardian, free of her influence, returns to its original programming.

...It looks like monsters may have wandered into the area while she was searching. Something is riding that horse visible in the distance, and it looks far too short and wide to be human. It's still reasonably far away... But it has a horse.

Wait, there's three of them. At least one has a long spear.

She's better at sneaking than she is at fighting. She turns the camo on her suit on and slowly heads villagewards.

The monsters fail to notice her. The trip back through that canyon-y passage is boring.