"I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss an insufferable geek with delusions of malignancy," Boushh said, amused, "if those gritty MacGuyver reboots have taught us anything..."<br/><br/>"Just avoid locking him in a supply closet and you should mostly be fine," Ghost said, "Auxilia is another matter entirely. Let me give you the run-down on her, for Kanina's sake at least; she takes a little more explanation than Quinn or Recluse."<br/><br/>Hooking a plug from his armor into the presentation laptop, the pictures changed to a series of technical readouts on a gynoid, soft pink hair and seams where her skin fit together and a lithe but particularly attractive body, assuming one was into robot girls. The next one was a view of her repairing her arm, which was not quite so attractive.<br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Image</div><div class="spoiler_body">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/6/64/Megurine_Luka_butterfly.jpg)</div></div><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Image</div><div class="spoiler_body">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/0/06/Megurine_Luka_bandages.jpg)</div></div><br/>"So, we have a fair number of AIs running around, and with certain notable exceptions it's gone a lot better than anyone expected. Singular, consolidated, unique - you need to transfer the whole thing at once, and to get another you really need to build an entirely new one. For most intents and purposes a person, just one that was born in a computer. Auxilia is not that. Doctor Van Evil and<em>yes</em>that was his name," Ghost's tone dripped disapproval of anybody who would take a villain name so utterly cliche'd, "made something that nobody has been able to replicate since, at least to our knowledge. Auxilia is less like a singular organism and more like a reproducing hive-mind species."<br/><br/>As Boushh refilled them on popcorn, the image switched to a small army of about a hundred copies of said gynoid; most were directing foot traffic away from a space where a smaller number were fighting heroes; a small number with light-projection polearms were covering a contingent that had strapped-on giant energy cannons. There were also a couple in skimpy french maid outfits sweeping up the battlefield and one driving a backhoe moving broken pavement into a neat little pile. Apparently a fight with heroes was no excuse to leave a mess?<br/><br/>"The whole operation that started her out was a Stormwatch Black affair so the old man would be pretty sore if I told you everything, but Van Evil, that fucking idiot had designed her as his harem. I managed to make some alterations and freed her from his control and we took him down, good times all around. Then, in gratitude for having been turned loose, she turned around and tried to take over the world. She's got a very... distributed perspective, but as far as I can tell she was after some sort of communism administrated entirely by her. Computerized central planning might have totally failed for the Soviets, but by Jove, she was going to do it better.<br/><br/>That's her agenda but, like Quinn, she's willing to work under another villain in exchange for resources. If I wanted Auxilia, aside from technical expertise which she has in spades, it would be for a big and scaling supply of manpower that I could nonetheless interact with on a personal level instead of worrying about logistics, organization, bureaucracy, all that. In other words, an auxiliary force, and a powerful idiot's perfect henchgirl."<br/><br/>"For bringing her in-" Ghost began, but Boushh interrupted, "she was a harem? They could just seduce her, couldn't they?"<br/><br/>Ghost facepalmed for the Nth time this hour, "you're half right, it would work but a number of heroes will attest that it's not exactly a good idea, there are, ah, pretty much always more of her than there are of you. Captain Hammer did fine with it when she participated in the fourth invasion of Prague, but that's, well,<em>Captain Hammer</em>and last I heard he's gone off to become a spaceship captain."<br/><br/>"Space cowboy captain," Boushh corrected, "had a problem with a bounty hunter who wa-"<br/><br/>"Right. Anyway, she hasn't been out long, and given the price fluctuations of the necessary alloys she hasn't built herself back up into a proper army yet, so now's a good time. If you were just anyone, capturing her would be a nightmarish game of whack-a-mole against a hydra that was also made of bees, but I can get you the master transmission decoder we used last time; capture a commander drone and you can use it to pinpoint the locations of the rest."<br/><br/>That was awfully convenient. Had Ghost had plans of capturing the wayward AI himself?<br/><br/>"Zohar's being treated as a powerful idiot," Ghost concurred with Darclight, "which worries me. My gut feeling is that it's too well-informed, too aware of our procedures, our classifications of villain threat and the unique methods of containment we devised - at least for those prisoners we had classified as human or near-human." He crossed his arms, "bear in mind that I've been in the espionage business most of my life so my first instinct is<em>always</em>that there's inside information being leaked, but... this looks a lot like that. On the other hand if it's magical then I guess scrying, necromancy, tea leaves, all that become information sources so it might just be obnoxiously good at gathering information in ways we haven't yet perceived or proofed against."