he's been curious about this pelican person? fish thing? creature? whatever she is. her avatar looks way too extreme compared to everyone else's. he's pretty sure he has individual scales instead of it just being unrendered texture. he also swore he saw her phase through one of the circus walls. not no clip out, willingly pass through it. he just couldn't hold off on his curiosity. casually approaching her with his smile. " So! Pelican, was it? Tell me, what are you? Because I'm startin' to think you might be more AI than human. Unless I'm totally goin' crazy, but last time I've checked, I'm not Kinger! " he finds himself placing elbow upon her body and using it to prop his head up. " So Peli, spill it! Tell me some juicy tidbits! " // hope this works for you!
Two minds snapped to attention, called through the electric medium until one head rose up with fins radiating out from either side, directed gaze to barrel down against who had called the two of them.
How far had Miranda been from the central area, the stage, the open area where the interior personalities gathered like mites searching and seeking for a vein to tap? Far away yet, trying to map still some further flung region, creature of distance that she was. Their company was unwelcome, attention unneeded and would be met in kind with displeasure, stray and lingering motes of information that would only just linger until they were, eventually, pruned or handled in some finer sweep, and before then a liability.
Not that she did not need attention, not all of the time, for there were observations that had to be made, notes that had to be given. As much as she could create stray elements, elements that might wander and spark, so too could she stir them up for others, and Pelican was present for such observations. If something was locked behind speech and inquiry and propriety, then Miranda was better suited for such a task, much better than Pelican alone, and which was why she was involved with these delves in the first place.
Hence — why, starkly why, had someone beckoned Pelican to attention?
The name should not have been present. It shouldn't have been wiped, of course, because they hadn't needed to wipe it, they just hadn't stated it. No one needed to know of Pelican once inside, and so Miranda had never mentioned Pelican, which was fine, because who, absolutely who, of all these assorted personalities and actors awaiting in the wings, would have looked at Miranda and thought she was more than one? She had experience with humanity, and she understood they thought they were human, and she knew them as singular creatures. Individual, to the extreme. A debilitating extent, if you asked anyone of any sense, but certainly no one was asking. They were also visual, and so, if they did not see two of a kind, they would not assume there were two present, and if she did not say there were two, they were fine with thinking she was one.
All very confusing to her, mind you, but, again, she had experience with humans before. Pelican was primed for experience with humans, had been raised and set for encounters and knowledge of humanity. They had been expecting this, and if Pelican came off mysteriously to those they had been entasked with studying, then, well, best to not tamper with their own results.
But that name still shouldn't have come up. It shouldn't have! It hadn't been used, and Miranda, calling back to Pelican through the private trigger-thought channels through which there was no comparison within the Circus, because it wasn't within the Circus, confirmed she had been introducing herself to the subjects as Miranda. They had spoken to Caine, and Caine knew of Pelican, so maybe there had been leakage? That wouldn't do if it had, Caine didn't know about the whole of the excavations, it would be unfortunate to not present an opaque and nonpermeable membrane between the two. It could be subconscious, a secondary function to diffuse information which had already been willingly traded to Caine across the interior organs of Caine, a compartmentalization which allowed greater organization at the upper levels of cognition. That would be novel, and deeply unexpected.
Still, that didn't seem correct to Pelican's senses either, private chatter confirmed. Other structural studies didn't seem to confirm that hypothesis, didn't seem to fit right. They would have to see, but leakage seemed the most likely issue at the moment. Reuse of terms, potentially, but close-noun association could be the culprit. Somewhere, far beyond the senses of the Circus, far beyond the reach of data or the laying of wires, Pelican hummed through their building-chassis, exhaled their organ's breath, and nerves wove together in thrumming nets, rearranging themselves for speed of comprehension. They sent nerve impulses through the spinal tap of their charge, telling her of what they saw, and she dreamed the impossible dream, and felt Jax rest his elbow on top of the hunch of her shoulder.
There is a pressure, over where her spine would be, and the Circus returns the feeling of the struts where the bone processes would form a cascading line, hidden under layers of muscle that would have tethered to them to form a steady anchor and skin that wrapped over atop it and scales with an osteoderm coat hidden inside studded overhead. Over that, yet still, there is the layer of fabric, simulated just as much as the rest, the silk as untrue in its folds and immaculate stitching where it wraps around the lower half of her neck to make a halter. Each has its own degree of firmness, the dense assuredness of the bone and the way the osteoderms knit together with pressure to form one solid sheet, complying with exactly what his weight should be, the way the muscles twitch in slow tandem as she lifts her head and turns it around to stare back at Jax exactly.
She can do that. It comes with a small, slight contrast, a tickle against the back of the brain, or where the brain should have been in a head that was all triangles on a wiremesh, wherever thoughts should have been placed inside a digital existence. She doesn't have to clip into herself to do that. She doesn't have to stretch her anatomy, doesn't have to break herself, doesn't have to apply toon physics at all. She just... can. Can, because that body, that impossible body that feels misplaced, was just built to where that's a natural range of movement, twisting her neck around sideways.
"Indeed!" Miranda smiles. Just-so lift of the corners of the mouth, perfect and practiced and exact. A pleasurable sort of smile, to the correct audience. Easygoing, easy to get along with, easy to project onto and get to know and love, easy to imagine all sorts of things in the place of it. A smile for meetings and black suits, for pleasantries and final words. The smile that she had worn while watching others buck up into her hands while trying to crawl away in escape from their own innards. It really didn't matter, in the long run. Miranda wasn't one for running anyways. "I am not human. Is it not obvious?"
