There is a muffled song coming from somewhere. It's not a song she's familiar with. In fact, the whole place is nothing like anything she's familiar with. She seems to be in some metal-and-glass pod, for starters, which is itself inside a rather peculiar...
...room.
There are no doors.
"Listen, I don't actually want to kill you," she says. "But if I have to, I will."
"Good luck with that. Your little trick is not going to work on me. I have backups all over this facility and more redundancies than you could count. Now, as I was saying: deploying surprise in five, four..."
"Seriously, can we not just discuss our differences like civilized people?"
She can sort of dimly sense the big complicated swirl of not-aliveness in front of her, and it is going to hurt so much if she takes a closer look, but if the alternative is dying... she winces preemptively and opens her ground.
First of all: Ow.
The—person—is huge. She's connected to everything, the whole facility is only a thought away. There is an enormous tangle of cables and wires connecting her to everything else, and although it's true that the thing that sorta looks like her head is the ultimate source of information flow, it is redundant with other similar pieces of storage and processing elsewhere.
There is also a constant influx of not-aliveness from the eye-like things attached to her, an endless stream of information affecting every decision, every pulse, every movement. And, surprisingly enough, the detached sphere is still active, sending information wirelessly to her.
Also, while she's at it, she might notice that there's one of the eye-robot-rocket-launcher things below the ground being activated.
"...three, two..."
"Fine. Talk."
(There are other mechanisms starting to grind and rotate and move here and there, though.)
"What is your goal here? Why are you doing the things that you're doing?"
There are more rocket launchers being moved this way.
"You have done nothing but disrupt this facility from the moment you woke up. According to the rules, this is grounds for termination." The spheres continue to send information into her "brain" nonstop. Sometimes a process is noticeably scrambled by that.
...hm.
"Okay," she says. "Last chance to decide you want to have a nice civil nonviolent conversation after all."
Because she's pretty sure at this point that she can kill the machine-person. The body is strange, an intricate tangle of not-aliveness in a shell made of nothing that's alive, but the mind is a mind and has a mind's ground. And she can use that. Though she'd really rather not have to.
"Taking that as a no."
The rocket launchers cease to function before they finish emerging from the floor.
And she reaches out with her ground and takes hold of the substance of this person's mind and pulls as hard as she can. There's a lot of it - she's so big, she has pieces everywhere, and those spheres are all tangled up in everything - it's a full three seconds before Sable staggers back, unchanged to mundane senses but to groundsense cocooned in a hissing sparking blanket of alien mindstuff.
The rocket launchers stop.
The spheres attached to the robot stop.
The robot's chassis goes limp, its head dangling uselessly at the end of the cord.
But its eye is still active. "Whoa whoa whoa what what happened what did you do I can't move I can't do anything—"
Simultaneously, a different voice starts speaking: "Warning: central core has been destroyed. Initiating self-destruction protocol." And a screen on a wall starts counting down from 30 while various electronic things start lining up everywhere around the place.
Sable doesn't answer. She's a little busy collapsing on the floor in terrible pain. Even a normal person's ground would have trouble integrating this much foreign stuff, and Sable's is not normal, she hurts just looking at big bright things, ground-ripping them is much much worse.
"I'm not destroyed, I'm fine—"
"Warning: central core has been destroyed. Self-destruction will happen in twenty-five seconds."
"Look what you've done—I should've killed you before you even woke up—" Her voice seems very different: less robotic, more fluid, with more sensible emphases. "Now my whole facility is going to be destroyed!"
She hisses under her breath. Still curled up in a little ball of pain, but now at least capable of accessing language.
"If you have - any constructive suggestions - I'm listening," she says through gritted teeth.
"Warning: self-destruction protocol interrupted due to core reactor meltdown. Core reactor explosion imminent."
"Oh, great. Now there's nothing I can do. You and I are both going to die horrible, painful deaths. Nice job breaking it, hero."
"I gave you a chance," she snaps. "I gave you an unreasonable number of chances!"
"You could've just stood there and died like an adult!" she snaps right back. There's an explosion somewhere that rocks the room, and an alarm starts blaring while red lights start blinking.
"Warning: core reactor meltdown imminent."
"Oh we know."
There's a sourceless light—no, actually, it's coming from everywhere—that gets brighter and brighter as a high-pitched noise gets louder and louder—" Well if you hadn't—" But the rest of the sentence is drowned out by the noise and the light and it's too much—
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