[Indigo]

She had figured it would be simpler to stay in the park, since she wasn't sure how the portals would affect her hardware--they probably wouldn't do anything, but she wanted to be safe. After all, this whole event was structured around finding things, and that was her function. Almost her sole function, in fact, which was something she'd been meaning to discuss with Dexter, but he was so busy lately with the new design commission that she hadn't had an opportunity. That would be all right, though. It wasn't as if she had a time limit for that.

Probably at this point she should be looking for eggs, but Eve's directives were lined up in a very straightforward order, and they said she had to find the person who'd rented her first. That kind of thing wasn't something she could override, nor did she especially want to, since she usually didn't work by herself. She needed at least a little outside direction to work. Something else she'd been meaning to ask Dexter about.

But none of her directives said she couldn't wander around and smell a few flowers while she waited.

[13]

[Palenski]

Tristan was looking for a robot of some kind.

"Some kind" here meaning that he had no idea the size or shape or even color that he was supposed to be looking for. If he had been told, oh, purple with blue polka dots and rather squat and boxy, that would have made things a lot easier. But as it was, he wasn't sure if he was looking for a large shiny looking one or a small squirmy one like a rodent or miniature dog.

Part of him briefly mused the idea of whistling and saying, "Heeeeere, robo, robo, robo." And then the rest of him thought, no, that's silly, but he realized too late that he'd already done it. Oops.

[Indigo]

She didn't actually have any idea what her theoretical companion looked like--she knew his name was Tristan, because that was the name the man who'd come to rent her had given. But he hadn't actually been Tristan. He'd been a friend, he said, wanting to be sure there wouldn't be any difficulties in the hunt; he'd had a weird name, something with a P, but Eve hadn't been paying too much attention because she was so excited about the prospect of an egg hunt. Last Easter Dexter had bought a box of chocolate eggs full of weird creamy stuff and that had been it.

She supposed she would just ask any man she met if his name was Tristan, until she found the right one.

Eve picked a direction and started walking; her choice was based on a gut feeling, but that meant a lot less now than it usually did. Since she'd never met Tristan, and neither had Dexter, who'd programmed in the directives, she wouldn't be able to smell him or sense him or do anything else to track him down better. So she walked in a relatively straight line and hoped.

[Palenski]

"Roooooobot."

"Olly olly oxen free!"

Tristan cupped his hands to his mouth, calling out in different directions. Well, he was certainly trying to find something now. This wasn't an egg hunt, it was a robot hunt. Though really, he was fine with that. A few others around him shot him strange looks, and he grinned back at them before resuming his useless yodeling.

"Yodel-ay-ee-hooo!"

Palenski had told him not to make a fool of himself or make anyone uncomfortable. The problem that Palenski had not thought of was that Tristan didn't know when he was making a fool of himself or others uncomfortable. He was Tristan. Sending him alone on an egg hunt without at least telling him what his mechanical companion would look like was possibly one of the most idiotic things Palenski had done in quite some time, and he had done some pretty idiotic things.

[Indigo]

Well, that was unusual.

She followed the sounds with some amusement--she recognized one from a game of hide-and-seek Dexter and some of his friends had arranged in Eve's early operating days, when they were still testing and before she started thinking about things quite as much. But it still sounded very silly. Obviously the eggs weren't going to come out if you called them. What sort of madman was this?

Eventually she reached the source, a green-skinned man standing in the grass and shouting in apparently random directions. It was clear he didn't have any idea what he was doing, Eve thought, but maybe he was the person she was looking for. That stuff the P man had said about difficulties had made her thing that maybe there was something odd about this Tristan person, something not necessarily dangerous but certainly disruptive and problematic if allowed to get out of hand.

She walked up to him. "Hi there! Are you Tristan, or do you know who he is? I'm supposed to be helping him and I don't know where to find him."

[Palenski]

"Robot thing!"

He threw his hands up into the air in joy. The silvery creature standing before him was possibly one of the most adorable things he'd ever seen. He had to very strongly resist the urge to scoop it up into his arms and squeeze it and feed it little robot treats.

"Yes, I am Tristan," he said, bouncing slightly from one foot to the other. "And what is your name, little robot, if you have one?"

Ohgoshohgosh tiny robotic companion thing. This Easter egg hunt thingum was going to be a bajillion times better than he ever could have possibly imagined.

[Indigo]

"Oh, I'm the EVore. But most people call me Eve," she said, not adding that "most people" generally consisted of Dexter and the one or two...clients who bothered to call her anything when giving her instructions. Sometimes it was frustrating not to have been intended for sentience; most people, in fact, assumed that she'd remained that way no matter what she said.

She looked around. "It's very nice to have found you! It wouldn't have taken me this long, but I didn't have a description of you, so I just had to guess," she said. "Are you ready to start looking? I have some pretty good ideas of where eggs might be, and I'm very good at finding things. It is my job, after all." Function, even.

[Palenski]

Tristan put his hands on his hips, making a pouty face. "Well, yeah," he said. "I mean, I guess we're supposed to find the eggs..."

Oh, what was it he was trying to say. He frowned at a spot on his shoe. He was very excited to begin hunting eggs with this adorably little robotic critter, really he was, but there was something missing to the equation that was very important. He couldn't quite put his finger on it...

Oh!

"How are we supposed to work together if we know nothing about each other!!"

He sat down in the grass, making himself comfortable, crossing his legs like a child. The innocent and somewhat expectant expression on his face did not help him to look any older. "So, Eve! Tell me about yourself!"

[Indigo]

"Oh, uh..." Sitting down? Now wasn't the time for that sort of thing! They had important work to do and only so much time to do it in! Sure, the eggs weren't exactly about to run away, but neither would they find themselves. And she hated delays. She could handle negotiation and sometimes even short breaks from searching, but someone willfully avoiding the hunt wasn't something she had experience with. And she found she didn't like it.

But rudeness wasn't in her programming. "There isn't much to tell. My name's Eve and I'm a search engine. Not the internet kind--it's my job to find actual things that exist in the physical world. I'm very good at it. Mr Tristan, I think we should be going now." She fought the urge to tap her foot.

[Palenski]

"Yes, yes, okay," he said, reluctantly pushing up from the ground. "But I still think it's important to know one another. For example, I'm an alien! Sort of. But what's important is that I photosynthesize!" He beamed.

He glanced around, eyes grazing the patches of grass around them, looking for lumps or anything out of place that could be a hidden egg. "So what, exactly, are we looking for? Just...eggs? Or are they marked in any specific way?"

He took a step in a random direction.

[Indigo]

"An alien?" Well, now she understood. An alien would obviously have completely different priorities than she did, even in a timed situation like this; it was quite possible he had a different perception of time altogether, though that wouldn't much help them if they ran out of time before finding even one egg. She'd met a few aliens, and they were always a little strange. But interesting. Definitely interesting. "What planet do you come from, if it's okay to ask?"

As for the eggs--she knew plenty about Easter, and she was happy to explain it to him. She would have been even if he wasn't an alien, of course. "We're looking specifically for Easter eggs, I think. They're like normal eggs but they're painted in all kinds of colors and patterns, often pastels, to be decorative. You know, festive? Sometimes they're also made of plastic, but I don't think those are what we're here for..." The instructions were somewhat vague. "But they'll definitely be bright."

[Palenski]

"I'm not actually from a particular planet!" Tristan exclaimed excitedly. "I was born from...well. The best way to describe it, I guess, is space and time. Or something like that. It's complicated." He grinned.

He listened intently as the basics of Easter eggs were explained to him. He clapped his hands, his entire being seeming to alight with eagerness. "Colorful eggs! Sounds wonderful! I once met a woman who--or, well, that's a bit inappropriate." He paused before continuing, as though mentally scolding himself. "Where are we supposed to start looking, then?"

[Indigo]

"Born from space and time? Isn't everybody? You're going to have to explain better than that." Complicated didn't worry Eve. She was a computer, after all! She had access to vast stores of information, more so because parts of her had apparently been adapted from an information-hoarding robot--Dexter was very free with information regarding her creation, even though some of her questions could be rather strange.

"Hmm." She frowned. Time to do some real work, what she'd been brought here to do. It was always a little difficult to catch the scent at first, even when she had a basic idea of where something might be. She stretched up on her toes, tail straight behind her, head tilted up as if sniffing the air. Of course, she didn't have any olfactory sensors, but she did have a mechanism which, through a combination of some very intricate wiring and a dash of magic, allowed her to match patterns a certain way. Electromagnetic charge tended to help.

She stiffened, and took two steps to the left. "This way," she said.

[Palenski]

"Well, yes, I suppose that's true." Tristan thought for a moment. "Okay, so, you know how the universe is made up of a lot of empty space that's constantly changing in a way that humans would describe as time passing? I was born from that. Sort of." He nodded cheerfully, as though that was good enough explanation.

He watched with intense curiosity as she seemed to sniff the air. When she directed him to where they should look, he bounded off without warning, nearly literally leaping through the air, an excited expression of glee on his face and a certain energy to match that surrounded his whole being. "Eggy eggs!!" he cried out, gaining the attention of quite a lot of pedestrians around him.

[Indigo]

She gave him a Look. It was a pretty good Look, she thought; she'd been practicing it for some time after one of her--clients? Renters? Whatever--had said something ridiculous and she hadn't been able to adequately convey her disdain for his statement. The Look still wasn't perfect, of course, since she hadn't had many other people to test it on, but it was a pretty decent one all the same. "Sort of? You're not very good at this whole explaining thing, Mr Tristan."

My! She hadn't been expecting him to just take off like that! "Mr Tristan, wait! Slow down!" After all, if they did find eggs--and they were going to--they didn't want to draw too many people's attention to them. Then somebody else might take them and eve would have failed in her objective. Plus, this Tristan fellow would probably be pretty sad not to get anything. He reminded her of the few small children she'd met, easily excited and with boundless energy, and she had to assume he'd get disappointed in similar ways as well.

She was so busy chasing after him--and gaining, since speed was part of her design--she completely missed the colorful shell when she passed it. It was only several feet later, when several internal sensors started screaming that something was wrong, that she realized. She skidded to a halt, turned around, pelted back the way she'd come.

There! A curved bright surface, too oddly-colored to be a normal egg. She nudged it with her nose just to be sure, and watched it roll out of the small patch of unusually tall grass. "Mr Tristan!" She tried to shout a whisper, and failed. "Over here!"