The aftermath of an Endbinger battle is anything but orderly - and so at just the right moment a body might be left unwatched long enough for a portal to open and a hand to reach out and touch it.
boooooooooooored.
She doesn't complain, though. She - shouldn't try to design any devices, but she can... mentally tell herself stories out of books she's read, and, uh. Try to guess what general sort of defensive properties Rete's housing will need to survive the Birdcage without even slightly trying to guess how she will accomplish it?
Going by the Birdcage lighting cycles it's five days before the Fairy Queen decides to summon her again.
Does the Queen sleep, such that she can feel as though she is physically sleeping and daydream as hard as possible?
Not during the five days, though she does summon a shade each night who refreshes her in a manner that feels similar, drawing energy from several froglike creatures created by a second shade to do so.
She's like Eidolon except she has a stable library of powers with prior art and she can practice with them. Why does she choose to live in the Birdcage.
What's she doing that's too interesting to sleep through, huh?
Bringing out various shades to get their opinions on what various powerful individuals in the Birdcage are up to, with special attention paid to Teacher, String Theory, and Ingenue. Most of the shades she brings out for this are thinkers, but a few are capes who worked under the individuals in question when they were alive, and there are some tinkers as well.
On the fifth night, this includes Lorica.
"Hello, Scout. I desire your analysis of the functioning of this device."
The device in question looks somewhat like a video game console from the 80s.
"Looks like a musical instrument - you could use it like a looper, if you wanted, it can do recording and playback in addition to producing new notes. It'll take voice instructions, which is not how I would have designed it, though if you like it that way I could probably twiddle it so it automatically edits those out of its recordings."
"If you left it active, yeah. I can fix that too but my stuff has a bit of a mind of its own, it might not always agree with you about what it ought to be recording."
"It doesn't seem to be keyed to any specific instructions, so it might recite them to anyone who thought to ask."
"Hm, the challenge then is whether we can provide its recreational functionalities to our subjects without allowing the acquisition of those recordings by the False King, as I suspect this device is designed to enable." Based on prior uses of the term, Lorica has probably figured out that the False King is Teacher.
"Do you want me to see if I can get it to hate him personally and anybody he's whammied?"
A fourth shade can grow those out of coral, with a fifth to harden them. Lorica feels her tinker power dim as they do this, but it returns in full when the additional shades are recalled.
Interesting.
Anyway. Making a device hate Teacher and his dudes is a little more predispositional than she can usually get a thing, but she herself is really unfond of Teacher and by extension his dudes and broadly in favor of privacy, so. Twiddle fiddle tweak.
The Fairy Queen gazes into the middle distance with her power sight in the meantime.