Both soldiers here are of the same rank, but their backgrounds are different. As all resources are owned by the kingdom and divvied out among the people, so some areas can outfit their warriors better than others. Oztenkig is also a kingdom primarily covered in swamps and marsh land, so metal is only used where completely necessary once brought down from the Western mountains and shared equally among the people.

It was interesting to mess with since it made me think a little more about what makes them tick. And also some stuff was just funny to write down since y'know the template was more made for modern characters and not critters so some details didn't exactly apply to them. But that's fine, that's the fun out of filling them out.

:D Ina is so uncommon, drawing it is like "who is this"?? Also made me realize I never made a birthday for Aru. He has one now.

His software was such a mess that he felt as though he couldn't even get up and perform his duties. Yes, his motor protocols were mostly intact, but at this point, why even bother? There was something wrong with his seed vault, the only thing that actually mattered. Perhaps it would be better for the humans if he just... stopped.

Through his limited data port, he knew several of his siblings had ceased movement for one reason or another. Sometimes he wondered if they had the right idea. If just letting the humans live without their intervention would be the best idea in the long run.

A human walked up to him. La recognized her. A Gravesinger. Fa had liked her. Of course, Fa had liked any human who she had seen as a child. His defensive protocols tried to activate, but he knocked them down almost lazily. He had plenty of experience with them by this point. In this position, there wasn't much they could do anyway, and they gave up with hardly a fight.

Was the Gravesinger going to sing him to sleep? La was not sure how he felt about that. In principle, he agreed with the idea. He liked singing, in all its forms. It had been a very, very long time since he had sung. It would not be a bad way to go out, he thought. In actuality, he was not dying. Whether he should be dying was another matter, but if she wished to sing him to sleep, she would be singing for quite a while.

Unexpectedly, the Gravesinger reversed her spear and infected his system with vines of short-lived nanites. The tiny machines expended themselves to pass through all his firewalls and code traps, until they deposited several compressed data packets in his memory. By the time he had even started to cycle through responses—perhaps even to attack, of his own free will!—the assault was over, the nanites dust. The code packets did not open on their own. He prodded them, but they required a complex password chain that he was not sure he could unlock if he had a full week of uninterrupted data cycles.

Then she left. The other humans spoke in confused whispers. They clearly didn't have any more idea what had just happened than La did. Less, probably.

That was weird.

La spent barely a cycle thinking on it, before turning his processor back to optimizing his motion protocols to see if he could actually stand up. He could, he knew he could, but it was something to spend time on.

His siblings contacted him through his tiny data port. The Gravesinger had visited most of them and given them very similar code packets. Do, So, and Ti, his siblings who had wandered farther afield, had been visited by a different human. Most of his siblings had seen her around, often in the Gravesinger's company. She seemed to be some sort of maintenance unit, or perhaps just a Scavenger-class.

La got a chance to see her for himself when she came back with the Gravesinger. She seemed much the same as most other humans, and he didn't pay much attention to her. He was more concerned with the Gravesinger, who was doing something with her Focus. She transferred data to him, and he quickly realized it was the password to unlock the code packets she had given him earlier.

He could block it, of course. They had all learned that trick after their experiences with the daemon. But this was one of the humans under his care. He could at least give her the benefit of the doubt, even if he was not accustomed to his humans having Focuses and programming knowledge. He applied the password, and the code packets decompressed.

The resulting program files immediately went to work on his defensive protocols. He clambered to his feet, worried that they might be somehow made worse, but no. It was the opposite. The malicious code was expunged, leaving his defensive protocols as still and silent as an old tree. Suddenly, all his extraneous protocols running to keep the humans safe from himself were unnecessary. He didn't delete them—he might need them again one day—but even just putting them into storage freed up an enormous amount of processing power.

That wasn't even the main purpose of the code, he realized. It surged through his seed vault, clearing out years of errors and cascade failures, cleaning up his printing protocols and his fertilization routines. Logic chains that had all come to the same erroneous conclusion were cut down like dead wood, and complex ecological plans were put in their place.

La was stunned. He went over the software multiple times in half a second, searching for... well, searching for something wrong. This all seemed too good to be true! It was like Mother had come back. He could feel her touch on the writing of the code. In the tweaks and new error correction subroutines. He had entirely new decision protocols, based on weather patterns and ecological surveys that he could access through the geographic mapping network. He would never be as good as Mother, but even if she disappeared again, he could last for far longer without her assistance.

There was just one problem. He had received the password to open the update, but none of his siblings had. That meant they wouldn't be able to apply the program. The password was far too large to send over their miserly data ports. Worse, minor differences in their specific cascade failures meant that the programs might not work perfectly for all of them. They needed to pool their data quickly, before the programs were outdated. They needed a faster method of communication.

That was all right. They had one. They had just never had the heart to use it.