Is that a robot.

The woman spins back to face her, weapon lit and raised to a guard position, expression questioning and more than a little incredulous. The robot peers out from behind her.

Shit it moved it's a robot how in the fuck does she use this gun is it even loaded

The gun jerks out of her hands and lands at the woman's feet; she kicks it into the closet.

"Eeep!"

Yeah, well.

She gestures with her free hand and the robot closes the closet door.

That doesn't really help there is still totally a robot in that closet aaaaaaah

Well, it was worth a shot.

She gestures the bedroom door closed and makes a shooing motion to indicate that Peka should sit on the bed.

She doesn't have enough plastic yet to make that legal.

Well, as she likes.

The weapon turns off again, and the woman sits cross legged on the floor and closes her eyes.

Peka does not know what that is about.

If she calls her CO the CO is red too, she'll understand, but the calls are probably monitored...

And Deskyl meditates.

It takes a while - mindreading isn't her forte, and reading Force-insensitive people is always harder, and her concentration isn't at its best - but given fifteen or twenty relatively uninterrupted minutes, she should be able to get at least an overview of what's going on.

...Peka calls in a status report that doesn't mention the alien but does say that she's canvassed most of the village and didn't find any dead. She does it in writing so her voice won't shake because aliens with robots, the reds will all die, her baby will die even if she keeps ahead of the payments -

Well. That's... something.

She opens the closet again, signs to the robot, and stays between her and the other woman as she leaves the room. Then she sits again, next to rather than in front of the door out of the room.

Where is that robot going???

The alien has no answer to this question.

The robot comes back after a few minutes, though, with scratch paper and a pack of colored pencils; she takes them, signs again, and closes the door with the robot still on the other side of it. Then she draws - a brown-haired stick figure with a black cloak and a red light-sword next to a hairless grey stick figure; set a little apart from them, a pink-haired stick figure and a pink-haired swaddled baby. That done, she shows her the picture.

Katin's hair is orange. To the extent she has any. How did the alien know she had a baby at all? Why is she drawing them? ...why doesn't the alien with a robot have any electronics? Puzzlement.

Puzzlement isn't panic, that seems like a step in the right direction.

She switches to a light blue and draws a curve between the stick figures of herself and her droid and the ones of the woman and her baby, suggesting a shield protecting the latter from the former.

...nope, if aliens want to replace reds with robots reds are not gonna be saved by blue force fields or anything else. Or else Peka doesn't get it, that's also likely.

This gets another incredulous face, and then a wince that turns into a yawn.

...that might mean a tired alien or it might mean something totally else on account of alien.

She certainly looks like a tired alien.

She calls the droid back in.

aaaaaaaaaaaaah

Unhappy tired alien.

Soothing hand gestures?

Well yeah it doesn't look like the robot is going to attack her right now it's just that it implies sixty-five million reds burn to death in their homes before the year is out.