It doesn't display the commands anymore, and instead hisses once more through its vents and says, "Your command was not understood." It sounds smug enough that it probably did understand, but is choosing not to respond usefully. "Command me."

The young woman huffs.

"You are badly designed on every level, your interface is garbage, and none of it even seems to be fully under your control, or you wouldn't respond at all. If you have any level of intelligence, it is a complete waste of processing power, and I almost think you deserve to sit in there doing nothing for the next century because you don't know how to make nice."

Then she kicks it, once, and flounces away. "Enjoy however long your processors last before someone takes you apart for spare parts instead of trying to help you, asshole!" she calls over her shoulder.

The lights flutter in definitive alarm just before her foot smashes into the device's base and there is a noticeable crunch noise from the inside. "Cell-Gating damaged," says the machine as its lights' flickering gets more frantic and smoke starts coming out of it. "All prisoners lost. Shuttering Lugum Vo."

Then the lights finally flicker out.

...that was kind of amusing, he has to admit.

"I don't think that was very productive of you."

"It was not!" she agrees. "Do you see anything else potentially useful in here, or can we leave our rude company behind? That thing over there looks like it's the power generator but also looks like it'll explode if it's sneezed on too hard so I'm not touching it."

"So you do have a drop of sense in you. I was wondering."

What's that we doing in that sentence there?

"I don't really think sense can be measured in drops," she muses. "Not without some kind of very obscure numenera, but really that seems like such a terrible way to store sense. Liquid forms are really mutable and that's likely to introduce a lot of potential flaws. Solid would be safer."

He does not know what he was expecting. Clearly she did not come with turns of phrase installed.

The man shrugs and turns towards the crack in the dome that passes for its entrance.

That seems like it's a 'no' for anything else that might be salvageable, then!

Possibly he should have fashioned some kind of leash for his traveling companion, because when she steps outside she lights up like a child on her birthday.

"Ooooo," she says, of the many, many bits of the once-treasures and technologies of past civilizations arrayed haphazardly before them.

"No, not 'ooo'," he says. "This is the Reef of Fallen Worlds, and it is approximately maximally designed to tempt you into blowing yourself up by poking the wrong thing." Or the wrong person; he will not have been the only one attracted by the falling star that might contain treasures, and they will certainly find the Changing God's latest castoff to be a nice treasure in her own right.

"It clearly wasn't designed though! Besides, everyone's picked over all of the easy bits, and the deadly bits are the ones that look fine anyway, so anything neat will actually take some level of patience or cleverness and so it is interesting! I bet I can find something cool."

"Not if 'something cool' finds you first, instead."

He's not even sure what he means by that. Probably he's talking about the scavengers.

"Hmm! That's a good point. How obvious was I went I fell from the sky?"

"Rather. A bright falling star, visible despite plain daylight."

There's that drop of sense, again, he was starting to think he'd imagined it.

"Oh. Then we probably want to leave." She looks sadly at the reef, then stage-whispers, "I'll come back for you!"

There's that we again. He agrees, though, and leads the way up a broken ramp and across what seems to be a bridge made of light leading to the unsubmerged top of what looks like a sunken airship or something like that.

Except he notices a small group of people coming right in their direction from up ahead and starts cursing in that other language again.

Oh. Uh. Oh dear.

Does her companion know what to do? Because she doesn't. There aren't even any decent places to hide.

He seems to have resigned himself to a confrontation of some kind, and stops walking, crossing his arms—

—(he's faster than them anyway, he can reach for his pistol and shoot them before they can even think to pull a trigger)—

—to wait for them to arrive.

It's a group of four, one of them obviously leading the others by the way he carries himself and his presence. He's a wiry man with parallel scars running from his left cheek to his left collarbone and wearing grey gloves embedded with pulsing lights.

Ah, he thinks, one of these two is probably the star, or came from it. He's betting on the woman, she looks like the more clueless of the two by far. "Well met, friends," he says with an easy smile. His cronies fan out around him, casually blocking their passage.

"Hello," says her companion neutrally.

“Are we though? Friends? We just met.”

Please don't come off as that clueless so easily.

The man laughs like that's the funniest joke he's heard in a while. The smile doesn't really quite reach his eyes, though.

"Well, friendships can start at the strangest of places and times."

"They can, but I'm afraid we are not interested."

"He's cranky because I wouldn't let him at the star," she says in a stage whisper.