The area indicated is currently in a light twilight, on the northwestern edge of the Pacific. The geography is... A bit odd, though. Perhaps odder than the crater in the moon. 

Well. Perhaps not the geography. Japan, for instance, is more or less where one would expect it to be, plus or minus some coastline. But there's ice at the equator - on the dark half of the planet only, clinging to what would probably reveal itself to be Mesoamerica minus the glaciers (and the western parts of North and South America) and extending in dramatic waves out over the Pacific, constantly churning with ice flows as water-heavy clouds rush in every direction from a massive storm in the Indian Ocean. The Arabian Peninsula and the Eastern coast of Africa are scorched wastelands; most of Europe and some jagged swaths of Asia are rainforest or wetland. 

Their 'quiet point' is in Japan, at first, which seems to be one of the few places with an almost normal climate. Kind of. If you don't think about it too hard. ...At least, it's not under a glacier. The point is outside of a region of city ruins, in an awkward and under-inhabited wedge between an area being consumed by desertification and a rather stubborn and dense forest - one nearby potential resources, too.

That looks a lot like the Earth is tidally-locked to the Sun. Braid does a quick measurement of the distance to the Sun, which reconfirms that the Earth is not vastly closer to the Sun than expected. Chalk that up to the local anomalies.

The location is sufficient, even if not necessarily perfect. Given the high level of divergence, historical records of invisible resources can't be trusted, especially if an exmatter-equipped civilization has occupied this planet for thousands of years already. Braid's psychokinetic sheath around the ship will quench the fire and muffle the roar of re-entry, and Steam's veil will shield the vessel from any stray eyes or ears that might witness their descent. That should be enough to keep them hidden, but Braid is nonetheless considering contingencies for if they are discovered. Better to be safe than sorry, especially with this world's level of anomaly.

Once the vessel has fully settled into its landing spot, next Braid will deploy the vessel's environmental assessment suite. Direct psychokinetic observation has already told her that the atmosphere is, broadly, breathable, but more detailed analysis of the air's chemistry and microbiology is could still reveal subtle toxins or pathogens that the team's personal sheaths might need to be adjusted for.

The air is... Actually really good. There's no detectable pollution, not even from natural sources like wood smoke - though the environment does show signs of seasonal burning, so they might just be remote in time from the last fire. There's tree pollen in the air, but at relatively low levels given they're currently in a grassland. The pollen isn't toxic, unless anyone happens to be allergic.

Perfect, no adjustments should be necessary then. "Steam, Doll, ready for recon?"

"Yessir." / "Ready."

Braid nods and activates the vessel's static veil. "Go ahead and find out what you can. House and I will begin building up the infrastructure."

And with that, the team splits up as commanded. Steam and Doll heading out to explore the vicinity with psychokinetic and telepathic scans whilst under the heaviest veil the two of them can manage, while Braid and House enter concert to start plumbing the area covered by the vessel's veil for the elements and chemistry they'll need to start the tech chain for a rift generator.

They find...

Robots? Ones that come up to approximately waist to chest height, and look oddly... Like a toy, honestly. They have stubby cylindrical bodies and spherical heads, with simple legs that don't have any kind of knee joint. Only a handful of them are visibly armed. It's unclear what they're doing; they seem to be randomly milling around. 

Curious. These machines also have a sheen of exmatter to them, even if it's a distinct species from the 'raw' brightness generated by rifts and metabolized by psychics. The two of them report it back to the growing home base, where the information is processed and a plan to capture a machine for deeper analysis is formulated.

In the meantime, Steam and Doll continue to scout out the area, determining where the machines are most densely concentrated.

There's not much in the savannah - but there's possibly large networks in both the desert and forest, though they're actively hiding themselves. 

And, also... 

There's two humanoid machines approaching their location, rather quickly. 

Doll will quickly lift the both of them up to the nearest available high-ground, Steam redoubling his focus on their veil. It may be a coincidence that they're headed straight for them, and if it is they'll let them by without a whisper, but if they are coming for Steam and Doll, they'll be ready. This is why Steam is specialized in 'contact management' as well as 'stealth'.

There's small boxy, flying machines tagging along behind them both - and some combination of the humanoid machines and the boxy machines seem to have exceptionally good senses. (Also the sheen of something resembling exmatter on them is less a sheen than a blindingly bright glow, at least on the two humanoids. The boxy machines' signals are a bit drowned out. The swords they have on their back are especially intense.)

And they veer to follow Doll and Steam's movements, picking up speed - they're fast, ridiculously so. Machines with a humanoid body plan shouldn't be that fast. 

Contact has been made. Given the level of exmatter involved, redacting these memories is probably not on the table. They might be actively attracted by the exmatter emanations from the psychokinetic lift, or even the veil? No reason to drop it yet, though. Just need to wait and see what these androids' intentions are.

Their intentions seem to involve stopping a short distance away and calling out, "Who are you?"

"13B..." the other one - a few steps behind the one that addressed them, her body smaller, with only a single thin black sword on her back - says warningly.

"We're explorers," Doll offers in minimal explanation. "Who are you?"

Steam drops the veil, since it's obviously not doing anything, and instead refocuses on seeing if there are any openings in the androids' mental defenses that he could exploit without tipping them off, borrowing some of Doll's familiarity with mechanical minds.

The smaller one turns to glare at him (her eyes are covered by a black blindfold, but it's impressive how much emotion she can convey anyways), and there's a sharp painful jab back. 

She ignores the interplay between 5S and Steam. "We're with YoRHa."

Steam doesn't physically react as he briefly reels from the psychic retaliation, before transmitting that their mental defenses are tight enough that he's not getting anything without entering a meaningful psionic engagement with the smaller one.

"I'm not familiar. What are you all up to? And, would you be willing to show a couple of...rather lost explorers around?"

"Who are you with?"

"None other than ourselves," Doll lies, with a forthright confidence only allowed by having evacuated all knowledge of their association with the empire from her mind, leaving only an innocent false self.

Steam has done no such thing, but he's keeping his mouth shut and watching his own mental defenses like a hawk.

"Are you defectors, then?"

Doll gets a thoughtful look as Steam places a guiding hand on her shoulder. "I don't think we've defected from anything in particular, recently at least, aside from Team Knowing-Where-The-Hell-We-Are. 'Defector' sounds like it has a specific meaning when you say it, though, and I can't say I recognize what it is."

She crosses her arms. 

And the smaller one interrupts. "Who created you, when, and where?"

Doll looks to Steam, who meets her gaze as he transmits a plausible story into her head. "A creche, on the Moon. We woke up a few hours ago, and had to abandon the facility since its generator was offline and the backup power was nearly drained. The surviving records didn't tell us much, like what happened to the Moon or the Earth, just enough to let us escape. We-" Steam gestures obscurely. "Oh, I suppose there are the other two as well. Our escape pod landed a ways over there," Doll points in the direction of the landing site, "and our two other crechemates are still there trying to build up a base."

Naturally, Steam has been beaming this story back to Braid and House, internally flinching at the irritation radiating from the two of them. They must be quite distraught for it to be this noticeable at range, but Braid doesn't formally reprimand either of them, so they're moving forward with this plan.

"...Huh."

To 13B, on a private and heavily encrypted comm: 'They're either organic or doing a good job of pretending.'

'So not just personnel created there...?'

She doesn't seem very impressed by the story outwardly. On the other hand, it's unclear if it's even possible to impress her. That's a very good stony expression she's got going. 

'Doesn't rule out - organic construction. That'd be basically useless for combat so we might not have seen it, even if it's advanced...'

'Tell that to the giant fucking boars.' 

'The machine lifeforms are interested in mimicking humans, though. We need to be on our guard.'

'I still think they're mimicking us... But even that special unit was pretty clearly a machine lifeform to my senses...'

'It evolved fast. It could have evolved more.'

The conversation takes place incredibly quickly, in compressed mode - it's over in the time it takes her to deliberately blink unimpressedly. "Let us see your escape pod. Maybe we can help." 

Between the two of them, Steam and Doll can tell that the androids have some kind of back-channel communication is going on, but without access to their enclosed noetic spaces and the encryption keys held therein, it's just noise. Steam and Doll have been back-channeling plenty, too, so it's hardly unfair.

Doll gives them a genuine and warm smile as she picks herself and Steam up. "Thank you, we can really use any help we can get." Then, Steam lets Braid and House know that they're returning to base with company (prompting another, if gentler, wave of annoyance) and Doll starts flying them back to base, making sure to not outpace the androids (which is easy, given just how quick they are).

They indeed keep up. 

"You work quickly," she comments, surveying what they have so far. (Though she'll leave most of the actual analysis to 5S.)

The base has definitely grown a bit since Steam and Doll left, as expected from a psychokinetic and technologist of Braid and House's calibers respectively. The terrain around the landing site has been remodeled to make somewhat difficult to notice from a distance and to provide vantage points for defenders around the perimeter, before delving into the earth, a checkerboard of storage piles and fabrication areas all operated by Braid's psychokinesis rather than by any sort of tangible machinery, interspersed with occasional mining pits from which narrow streams of material rise out before dividing neatly between the storage piles in accordance with the chemical make-up of the excavated matter.

"We think that some amount of rebuilding was part of the plan, given our abilities and the surviving records," Doll explains.

'They're not human,' she sends to 5S, confidently.

'Don't rule out possibilities... But organic constructions might be better at restoring the world than we are...'

"You're planning to stay here?" she asks. "It's not very defensible..."

'Or that's what they want us to think.'

"If you can mount the guns you'll see the enemy coming. But they can swarm better in this environment." 

"Well..." Doll and Steam exchange a look. "It mostly depends on what our number 1 thinks. Right now we're just trying to get a proper generator built so that we can stop burning through our reserves. But if this isn't a good place to stay, she'll pick it up and move us somewhere else."

At this moment, Braid and House exit the vessel at the center of the camp and hover over towards the guests.

"There's number 1 and 2 right now, actually."

"What would a 'proper generator' look like, and what do you need to replenish your 'reserves?'" 

"Uh, hm. I don't really have a good verbal description. It's a sort of blocky metal container that we fill with a special foam to capture and channel the high-energy particles coming out of a stabilized rift? I could transmit some visuals and structural data if you want to know more. Number 2-"

"Welcome to our humble abode, androids," Braid interrupts rather brusquely. "As number 4 was explaining, number 2 is our technology expert, who can give you all the details we have regarding the generator."

If 5S happens to switch to a scanner modality that can observe maso activity, it will be nigh-blindingly obvious that all of the activity going around the camp is all tied directly to Braid, who herself is brilliant with exotic energies.

She does; it's her standard way to detect active goliaths and special units, and it's how she knew that special unit wasn't an android. 

Prior model androids use water fuel cells for all their energy. YoRHa use it for some, especially for everyday activities, but the vast majority of their energy especially in combat comes from their black box. The black box does use maso, as do the oldest models of maintenance androids (especially Devola and Popola models) -

But not like this. 

'Definitely not androids,' she sends, extensively masking how high an alert this puts her on. '13B - '

'Don't attack yet. We need to know what's going on. And there's no sense wasting the energy.' She's maybe still slightly annoyed at 5S for starting the fight with the special unit; 13B had been content to glare suspiciously at it.

Her unimpressed nature makes it very easy for her to mask. She feels the same range of emotions either way. 

"I'd like that information!" 5S chirps, like she wasn't just contemplating stabbing them. "But 13B would be very annoyed if I broke regulations by accepting a direct unverified transmission. Can you transmit to an intermediary, or print the information onto paper?" That last is something the Resistance makes heavy use of - paper can't be hacked or spread logic viruses. 

House will definitely not mention that the empire has, in fact, created statically embeddable basilisks, and instead nod to 5S before working in concert with Braid to direct some of her psychokinesis through the fabrication process. A few seconds later, a stack of...not exactly paper, but sheets of a flexible pseudo-ceramic, with detailed descriptions of the construction of the smallest rift generator and exmatter collector (with all information that could potentially point in the direction of actual transuniversal displacement carefully removed) printed on them floats over to the smaller android.

Braid smiles, significantly less warmly than Doll's, before asking, "Is there anything else we can do for you?"

She has questions about the 'creche' they woke in, and about their ability to defend themselves from machine lifeforms - couched in terms of if they need help of course. And about their abilities.

5S, meanwhile, speed reads the papers. She's impressively fast at that, too.

The papers do indeed contain information on what materials are necessary (or just useful) for constructing the containment cell, capture foam, and stabilized rift, as well as what sort of geological processes tend to leave ores or deposits of these materials near the surface and in turn what sort of surface features can be used to identify where the materials might be found. There's also details on the chemical processes necessary to separate the relevant materials from their various substrates, processes to combine the materials into the desired compounds, and the macroscopic construction process for the generator and collector are also present. The only thing that might be confounding is the description of how the rift itself is created and stabilized, which delves into manipulations of 'exmatter' (seemingly an alternative name for maso) that may not map to anything 5S has records of, though at least on a surface level analysis it does seem to correspond with whatever it is that this 'number 1' is doing.

Meanwhile, Braid nods to House, who begins explaining the status of (entirely fictitious, but based on a real understanding of imperial cloning and psionic induction facilities) creche where they (supposedly) awoke few hours ago. Once that's done, Braid will in turn state that she is confident in her ability to defend against essentially any number of the bumbling toy-like robots which Steam and Doll encountered earlier, but that information on more dangerous machines (or wildlife, for that matter) would be greatly appreciated.

'...Don't think machine lifeforms have access to this.' She'll have to transmit it to Command to be sure, though. 'We'd have noticed them developing it.' 

She's also memorizing their explanation to transmit to Command, or course - while multitasking with relaying some of their information about more dangerous machine lifeforms (without revealing anything she isn't sure the machine lifeforms already know they know, or anything about her and 13B's own capabilities).

'...Different group of aliens?'

'Unlikely? But the possibility is alarming.' She'll mention it in her report, at least. 

Anyways! Here's a description of a goliath tank. And also of the Fucking Boars - seriously, don't tango with the giant white ones, you will lose. 

Neither of the maybe-aliens visibly takes notes, but House is certainly paying attention, even if Braid seems a bit skeptical about giant albino boars being particularly dangerous. Still, if these androids are spooked about them, despite their displayed capabilities, then maybe they have some sort of residual psionic abilities.

"What exactly are the machine lifeforms?" House asks, genuinely curious "The records we had didn't give us any indication of them. Where do they come from? Why are they hostile?"

'...Okay, yeah, different group of aliens.'

"They were created by the aliens as weapons. They're hostile because they're trying to take the planet for themselves."

"Aliens you say?" That would be a first. The only aliens that empire even theoretically knows of, at least as far as House is aware, are the hypothetical creators of the Spheres, if they aren't just some sort of natural phenomenon. "Do you know why they want the planet?"

Honestly, the four of them are beginning to wonder whether the empire would want this Earth. A proper invasion force could plausibly take it, but it's quite possible that these two androids make up only a tiny and less-than-representational fraction of this YoRHa's capabilities, which are apparently being matched by this enemy alien force, so the alternative seems well within possibility. The local exmatter technologies are interesting, but so far at least don't seem revolutionary in comparison to the empire, and not worth becoming embroiled in what may, in the worst case, actually be the prelude to a true transuniversal war.

"They don't answer comms, so no, we don't."

Houses sighs dejectedly. "Fair enough." Maybe Steam and Doll would have some luck digging into one of the machine's minds, if they could capture one and make sure it wasn't broadcasting anything.

"I understand if neither of you are historians," Braid speaks up, "but I think the thing we most need is some understanding of what happened since our creche was first made. The world was invaded by aliens, apparently, and now it's being...patrolled?" She gives a questioning look to the 13B and 5S. "By combat androids. Did any other human settlements survive? Is there any lasting instructions for what we should be doing, aside from staying alive and trying to rebuild?"

"It's being fought over. There's human settlements, the locations are classified. Our instructions are to win the war while keeping the planet inhabitable."

"There's no point in rebuilding yet."

Braid harrumphs a bit at that. "We need to build a generator or else we'll run out of our exmatter reserves, at which point we'll be essentially powerless, but after that I suppose we can focus on moving to somewhere more defensible and fortifying in-place there."

"Do you have any suggestions on where might be best for us to go?" House asks.

"Or whether there's anything we can do to help beat the machines?" Doll adds, having started to feel a bit left out.

"With powers as extensive as these you might be better served staying near your generator..."

"And 'what to do to help' is a question for Command, not for grunts like us."

More evidence for 'a tiny and less-than-representational fraction' hypothesis, House supposes. Caution is certainly warranted here.

"Very well," Braid says, letting go of some of her frustration. "If we can ask it, please send word of us to your Command. If we move from this location before we hear back from you, we'll leave a message here indicating our target location."

"Would you happen to have any sort of encryption that you could share?" Steam quickly adds. "So that we don't need to leave the message out here as raw text, just waiting for the machines to read."

"Just use a one time pad for something like that," she says. "Any of us can generate the key."

"Fair enough, we'll just need to make sure there's a good buffer in case we need to communicate anything unexpected or if you need to securely reply," Steam admits, promptly working with 5S to generate as long a one-time pad as seems practical.

...Her memory for a key is almost certainly greater than Steam's. And she doesn't need an actual copy of the key; she'll store it in her memory banks (and back those up promptly). 

True enough, at least until they get the generator up and running. Maybe a few gigabytes then, just in case of the slim chance that encoding a meaningful length of video proves necessary.

Once the key-sharing is done, Braid speaks up, "With that settled, is there anything else you'd like to ask of us? And, once you depart, would it be safe for numbers 3 and 4 to continue scouting out the area?"

...Worth a shot: "What kinds of abilities do you have?"

And: "Scouting depends on your risk tolerance. However, there are no known goliaths nearby, and you will see machine lifeforms coming."

The team's telepathic backchannel briefly flares as they collectively review all of the abilities they've already shown. "We have two broad categories of ability, each with an inward and outward aspect. One we call psychokinesis, which involves sensing and applying energy directly through exmatter appendages. The other we call telepathy, which involves interfacing with reified abstractions of the systems which are embedded in concrete physical space."

"Now that we know that our veils aren't going to do much, we can focus on being ready to run instead," Doll comments.

"How did you spot us earlier, by the way?" Steam asks. "If there's some obvious hole in our stealth toolset that it might be good to try and fix it.:

She confirms with 13B that it's permitted to tell them, then: "...You're using energy. You can't hide using energy by using more energy. That's not how it works."

Ah, they have some sort of passive exmatter detection, that doesn't itself have enough of a noetic signature to show up to shallow telepathic scans. That sort of thing is only barely even in the realm of theory, but House has at least heard of the relevant theories, so it doesn't sound like complete nonsense. It's impressive that the locals have that advanced an understanding of exophysics and haven't started experimenting with rift technology. More evidence that there's more going on here than meets the eye.

"Fair enough. If it comes down to, we'll make sure to stick with more...low-tech methods of camouflage, I suppose." 

That's all the team has to say at the moment, since it seems like getting more information from the locals needs to be filtered through their command structure, which is probably going to take some time. They won't rush the androids if they have more questions, or want to continue observing the base-building.

5S would like to observe! But she doesn't have many questions just yet. 

Braid and House continuing to work on the generator doesn't look like much, visually, aside from the two of them standing or occasionally walking around the base. Viewing it through maso spectra, however, reveals a whole invisible dance going on. It's mostly steady at the moment, but going from the data provided earlier, they should have enough resources to begin construction in just a few hours, at which point things are liable to get much more dynamic.

In the meantime, Steam and Doll head back out to do some more scouting, this time with minimal psionics usage. They're considerably slower for it, what with not flying around and not having the sheer strength and agility of the androids to compensate, but they're still competent for traversing rough terrain. Even if they're no longer shining like a bonfire to maso detectors, they still have heat signatures and other biosignals, so they'll do their best to stay out of the sight-lines of the local machines as they explore.

The machines do seem curious about them anyways! There's enough of the small stubby ones that staying entirely out of their sensory range is difficult, and there's a small swell in the continuous transmissions between them as one of the red-eyed ones catches sight of them. Its eyes flicker, almost like it's blinking.

That is a bit disconcerting! But probably not that much more weird than all the other strange activities Steam and Doll have seen the little tin-can machines bumbling through. Still, they'll mention it along with all the other newly observed behavior back to home base. Braid will note it down for future reference, but for now the orders are just to keep exploring, still maintaining a low-profile.

And so it goes, for a few days (going from the passing of ours, rather than the motionless sun). Then, suddenly, the character of the dancing maso in the base camp changes. The streams of atomized stone and ore stop abruptly, the storage piles all feed into the fabrication areas, which then feed into each other, the whole clearing steadily cleaning up as it sort of folds in on itself, a cloud of dust collapsing in on itself, taking the shape of simple, shiny metal cube with various ports and slots in each of its sides only in the last instant. It feels like it should be accompanied by a flash of light, like the birth of a star, or perhaps a thunderous boom, but aside from the brief exmatter burst it is otherwise quite sedate.

"The only thing left is to actually spark and stabilize a rift inside the containment chamber, which we'll be waiting until Steam and Doll come back to do," House explains to 5S.

"Can you explain more about how rifts work?"

They haven't been here constantly - they have a wide variety of assorted things they seem to be doing in the area - but they swing through multiple times a day, and they'd made a point of sticking around for this. 

House, given prompting, will happily launch into a detailed (and thoroughly redacted of potential implications of the existence of the multiverse) explanation of how rifts work.

The broad gist is that by compressing the right species of exmatter particles to the correct density, they can sort of open a 'hole' in the spacetime fabric, through which more exmatter particles will naturally be emitted. These holes, when very small, naturally collapse under their own gravitational fields (which, due the fabricial structure of the rift, do not actually extend outside the volume of the rift itself), but once they pass a critical ratio of volume to surface area, they will begin to naturally expand instead of collapse. Once this critical point is reached, additional exmatter constructs can be merged with the surface of the rift, which will channel a portion of the exmatter the rift emits and use it to suppress further growth. The rest of the rift's output is then captured by the capture foam, where it can be safely harvested and moved to long-term storage.

"What are the most common dangers with it?"

House explains, "Once it's stabilized, there's essentially no risk at all, it's entirely fail-safe, since even if more exmatter started flowing into the rift from outside, like if another rift was placed right next to it, the stabilization mechanisms will naturally scale to account for the increased exmatter flow. The only real danger is during the initial sparking of the rift, which is why we're waiting for all four of us to be here. The chance of the rift slipping out of number 1's control is already microscopic, but with all four of us here to catch it if something goes wrong, the chances are essentially nil."

"What'll happen if it does slip out of Number 1's control?"

"It'll continue expanding, though much more slowly. Then I and numbers 3 and 4 will quash it, and we'll start over."

"What happens if you don't quash it?"

"Well, I guess if no one does, then it would just keep growing forever." House gets a thoughtful look, and briefly glances over to Braid as they come to a collective decision, before turning back 5S. "I suppose if you're worried about this getting out of hand, maybe because the machines figure it out somehow and make the remarkably poor decision of trying to build a bomb out of a rift generator, we could share the info on how to suppress and reverse the growth of a rift with you? We don't have any information on how your own exmatter systems work, but you clearly must have some, so hopefully adapting it to the tools you have available should hopefully be possible."

"The machines are good at stealing technology, yeah - some of the most advanced units need to see a thing only once to come up with a counter. And they don't have self preservation coding. So information on suppressing that would be helpful."

"Paper again? It'll probably be smaller than the stack for the generator itself, since that contained a good chunk of the information already, this will mostly just be expanding further on the details of the exmatter infrastructure itself and maybe some speculation on how you could replicate it with what we've seen you all do so far."

"That works."

That's another stack of weird flexible pseudo-ceramic, with all the relevant information printed on it! It indicates that no, the exploratory team does not really understand how androids work, though they have figured out that they have some kind of weakly exmatter-active core inside them, and proposes that whatever technology is involved in that might be useful for repurposing into rift suppressors, since it is presumably already interfacing with exmatter in some way.

(This is actually more information on black boxes than she's been given before... Their function is a tightly held military secret, and it sparks curiosity in her, about what they do, where they're from, how they interface with this strange power...)

She'll scan, run her checks on what she's scanned, and securely upload the data. "Thanks."

House gives another smile at that. "It's pretty clear that a lot shit has hit a lot of fans since...whenever our creche was built,, at least, and plausibly before then as well. Hopefully we can help out once we work things out with Command and start properly building back up."

It's not too much longer after that, Steam and Doll make it back from their latest scouting excursion and the sparking process can begin!

One of the cubical structure's many ports opens up, revealing four circular slots, which each of the maybe-a-third-kind-of-alien puts a hand into. They all get a look of intense concentration for a couple minutes, and then there's a considerable, though only very brief, burst of maso from inside the cube, which then fades to a faint, intermittent emissions as the four pull their hands free. The shape of the generator, plus its gentle maso emissions, do give the appearance of something almost like an enormous black box.

The four of them didn't exactly look particularly stressed to start with, but with a source of exmatter established, a subtle tension between them has relaxed.

She has every sensor that she can at a time up, and flips rapidly through some auxiliary ones, watching intently. 

13B, on the other hand, is standing back, watching with a neutral expression (though also running some of the primary sensory arrays that most YoRHa have - especially a model like her - so 5S can focus on the more obscure ones).

To most sensors, the cube is just as it was before. Maso detectors can pick up a steady trickle coming from the surface of the generator. Over the following minutes, it also warms up a bit, according to both infrared and more esoteric sensors, though only a little bit warmer than it was before. Radio, microwave, UV, and X-ray spectra are all unchanged, penetrating sonar is picking up a slow, ongoing change in the sonic characteristics of the foam inside the generator, more than would be implied by the change in temperature, though entirely in accordance with the changes described in the documentation 5S scanned as resulting from the foam becoming saturated with 'exmatter'. Other sensors indicate broadly similar things, few to no exterior changes and internal changes conforming to expectations.

The four maybe-aliens have arranged themselves on four cushions near the generator, and Doll looks to the androids with a curious, and perhaps hopeful, look. "We're going to celebrate a bit, now that we've got a source of exmatter to refresh ourselves with. It's...something between playing a game together and entering an altered mental state. I'd guess you don't want to participate directly, especially since none of us are sure how it'd work with androids rather than humans, but I thought I'd ask anyway. Maybe we can loop you in on a sort of outer layer, so you can observe, if you're curious?"

"...I'm good."

"And I'm curious!"

Doll will go ahead and loop 5S in, then! It settles on her in a strange way, not receiving a data packet or encryption protocol, but almost more like a lens has been applied to her maso scanner suite. A small portion of the constant low-level maso buzz that's been going between the four maybe-aliens suddenly resolves into something coherent, a datastream that, after some more fiddling, appears to be...the informational silhouettes of copies of the four's minds, which meet and seem to fuse together, and then establishes individual datastreams with each of the four in addition to the broader communal datastream. From there, the exact mental state of each of the four wavers and shifts, first chaotically and then with growing purpose, like they're exploring the space of possible states and searching for one in specific.

(...They knew these guys weren't human. But this confirms it, in her mind.)

She examines and catalogues with an interested eye to learning what they're like.

It's not exactly a clear picture, but it certainly seems like it portrays more of their characters than the rest of their behavior. They certainly all seem deeply familiar with one another, their minds naturally fitting together into well-worn grooves. They have their roles to play, not just in terms of whatever formal ranks they bear but also in terms of their friendship.

Number 1 is definitely the leader, proud and used to making decisions, as being the shield under which the other three can shelter.

Number 2 is an advisor to number 1, but also a companion and support, whose knowledge forms a critical component of the foundation of her strength.

Numbers 3 and 4 are both slightly more accessory to the group, neither being as close to numbers 1 or 2 as the pair is internally, nor close with each other. Number 3 is used to moving fluidly between social groups, finding the gaps in the group's dynamics that he can fit himself into, while number 4 is more familiar with standing on her own, a strength similar in some ways to number 1's, though more self-contained.

It's good information, for someone like her. 

She settles back and waits for them to finish. 

It goes on for a while longer, maybe a couple hours, each of the four steadily zoning in on what seems to be their personal goal-state. Doll is first to reach it, and their silhouette turns to House's, the two of them working together to bring House to their own goal, before both go on to harmonize with Braid, and finally the three turn to Steam. From the moment Doll reached their goal, the entire 'game' was complete just a couple minutes later.

The four exit their trance soon after, all seeming...not exactly more cheerful, but maybe more confident.

It's fascinating to watch. 

After the celebration is complete, the team continues to laze about briefly in their mentally unified state, before eventually pulling back apart into individually distinct minds, Doll dissolving the psionic link (though now that 5S has experienced it, expanding her sensor suite to replicate the effect should be possible with some tinkering), then getting up off their cushions and packing them away into their capsule, and affixing the generation to some struts on the outside of the capsule.

Braid and House link back up, the resource extraction streams soon reappearing, though now instead of  feeding into formless piles they're instead constructing solid blocks, similar in size and shape to the generator's outer casing, before slotting onto the same sort of strut (or onto each other, once the capsule's struts are all full). Doll and Steam instead turn to the androids, and Doll speaks up again. "So, you mentioned this location not being very defensible. Would you be willing to help us scout out somewhere safer to move camp?"