<div class="floatleft">(https://i.imgur.com/tcy1ck7.jpg)</div><strong>"Oh, I know this!" </strong>Bunny said as she passed by the landmark laid in front of the shop, pointing at the sword,<strong>"Back before the monsters, you didn't need anything as big as a combat mech for armored warfare.  Still, there was a stretch where there was a call for mechanized infantry, so, exo-suits were briefly experimented with in this region."</strong>Bunny said, counting on her fingers,<strong>"They were heavily resistant to small arms, and, you know, we still can't build energy weapons at the man-portable scale, so all kinds of armor piercing solutions were tried."</strong><br/><br/>Hopping up on the stone, Bunny rested her hands on the grip, squaring her stance as though she intended to try and pull it from the stone.<br/><br/><strong>"Superheated cutting edges were a popular solution for a while, softening the metal as the heavy blade hit home.  The Knights  of old used to call this thing a "Face-Eater Blade" because of what it'd do to unarmored flesh without touching it.  Of course, once the incursions began, the old Battle Armors didn't have the stopping power necessary to safeguard the people, and being too big to swallow was suddenly a desirable defensive consideration."</strong>she smiled, hopping down again, letting her fingers stroke along the pommel of the blade, touching a tiny piece of history,<strong>"The neural connectivity between pilot and 'mech has its roots in that old exo-suit technology.  Most Warriors consider the old "Knights" as their predecessors ... there's a lot of romanticisation for that era in some corners."</strong>she said with surprising cheer.<br/><br/>Bunny paused for a moment in the entry way to the Knight Stone, listening to the electronic "bing-bing" that played over the speakers to announce her arrival.  Dripping on the broad mat set by the door, she looked around, her eyes tracing the high vaulted cieling with its exposed rafters high overhead and gymnasium lighting.  The place was clearly done in the brutal concrete-and-steel aesthetic that C-Town had so strongly embraced.  Still, hanging from the walls she could see aged wooden signs in faded colors for brews from bygone and fallen eras, silent reminders of better days bearing a promise that you could at least recapture the taste of those old days.  Painted above the refrigeration units in the back, someone had painted a stylized mural of mechanized gladitorial combat, swooping archetecture broken up by jagged sparks as mechanized hammer-fists crashed into heavy armor.<br/><br/>Wringing her hands with a bit of hesitance as she made her way towards the voice calling her.  It didn't have quite the<em>boom</em>she remembered from her youth, but it had been more than a decade since she'd last seen the man after all.  Still, it had the same warm, rough edge to it that he'd earned through years of drinking straight whisky.  She took a deep breath to firm her resolve and stepped up to the counter.<br/><br/>Behind the counter, a broad shouldered elder gentleman (https://i.imgur.com/9W71z0u.jpg) stood, watching a muted screen that was showing the pre-match commentary for a gladitorial bout being televised from the stadium deeper inland.  It looked like they were sending some monster of an up-and-comer into the ring with a former champion, and there was a lot of spirited discussion about how things might shake out.  Mizuki looked up (and<em>up</em>) and the tired looking old man Slab had become, her heart skipping a beat as he looked back at her with his one good eye.  She was a little crushed that he didn't recognize her immediately, but, she reminded herself, she'd grown a<em>lot</em>since he'd last seen her, and changed her hair color ... that last bit was something a lot of people had failed to look beyond in the past.<br/><br/><strong>"Hello, Mr. Slab, Sir."</strong>Bunny said, stumbling as she tried to find the words to properly introduce herself,<strong>"I'm ... ah ... Mizuki Cotton.  My father Joseph Cotton used to operate under your command?"</strong>she said, idly tapping her index fingers together, her eyes wandering away to look over the photos of bygone days the man had hung on his wall, including the Cavalier (https://i.imgur.com/3NJXGNu.jpg) he'd been piloting when he and her father had fought together.<br/><br/><strong>"I'm a Warrior too, now, and they deployed me to a base near C-Town."</strong>she said, looking back up at him again,<strong>"So, I thought, you know, I should come and introduce myself, and thank you for looking out for my dad back then."</strong>she said, offering a wane smile to the elder gentleman.