<span style="font-weight: bold">"Worship you?"</span>JD said, after returning to his own skin.<span style="font-weight: bold">"Are you really going to ask me to do that on a first date?"</span><br/><br/>The joke went over her head, and she suddenly felt very self-conscious.<span style="font-style: italic">Date?</span>she wondered.<span style="font-style: italic">Is that a joke? I don't get it. Ugh, stop shouting things, no matter how excited you are. Now I feel dumb.</span>The sentiment was expressed in the concerned look that creased her face. She tried to shake it off.<br/><br/>The last of the presents were open, and there was so much cross-over in the room, Doce worried she'd go cross-eyed. It was too much to keep up with and process, so she stopped trying, and just accepted the events transpiring before her. Finally, the binary man relayed the plan to them. They would fight in a tournament.<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">Oh dear,</span>Doce thought. She didn't perform well under that kind of stress, and she never knew how to balance her competitive nature and her hate of competition. It would be better if there was another option, but--<br/><br/><span style="font-weight: bold">"Oh, you mean the Overseer's Machine? The one that was DESTROYED??? The one that made the worlds go to sh*t? There. I said it. Nobody saved anything. They just made it worse."</span><br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">Oops.</span><br/><br/>She leaned in to have a private conversation with Beta. "It was destroyed back then?"<br/><br/>"Yes," he said, lowering his voice as she did. "With the materials I had access to, there was no other way."<br/><br/>"Could you build a new one?"<br/><br/>"No. My map of its workings is incomplete. Additionally, I observed some features of it which were not mechanical in nature."<br/><br/>"Too bad," she sighed, and straightened up. Then she heard the binary man explain that the tournament was structured like a decathlon.<span style="font-style: italic">Oh. That I can do.</span><br/><br/>"Count me in," she said, raising a hand. "These guys, too," she said, nodding to Beta and Ditto. "Are the men and women separated in this, like in the Olympics, or is it coed?"