Found When Lost

Farea's solitary work had been fulfilling, having successfully studied multiple creatures, opening them up with surgical precision and putting them together to the point where the creatures didn't even have a single sign of her cuts, and continue to live as normal. In addition to this, she had, with varying degrees of success, pacified more dangerous creatures with the least amount of effort. A common weakness to this regard were their spinal columns. If she would rather they die, the brain was the optimal target, if she could manage to get close enough without risking damage to herself. So far, her network of webs that served as her home and defense against the dangerous lifeforms of the wooded area were clear of hostilities. It had become a safe haven. But outside of her home base, she had to be careful as she didn't have a network of webs to freely run about. One day she was taken by surprise. A creature that she initially thought was harmless took on a different form to elude her sense of danger, and she suffered for her carelessness. A short fight ensued with her losing, taken out of the fight when critical connections were severed, rendering her unable to move and eventually ran out of power. Then everything began functioning again. It was only a brief moment for the android, the passage of time was not accounted for in a complete de-powered state. However, there was an emergency power cell inside the android that only activated once all the proper wires had reconnected. After a short moment of inactivity as the system began to reboot, Farea rose up, all six legs immediately moving forwards as the critical energy levels called for an immediate search for sunlight, the humanoid upper body still limp. But Farea's body stopped once it picked up a few rays of sunlight, and she slowly lowered herself flat on the ground. Before long, all of Farea's lights glowed, and her humanoid body straightened up, albeit staring blankly into space as everything was just beginning to activate.

Once everything had booted up, Farea's eyes, both humanoid and spider, adjusted their apertures, which caused the faint glow on them to focus in on one point and then spread out again. This looped three times before the android's body raised up and slowly settled as if it had just taken a deep breath and exhaled. On the spider's back, four panels opened in a similar manner to apertures and out popped four glass-like cylinders. All were nearly empty of the red fluid that used to be stored inside. After scanning the surroundings, Farea heard something speaking. Another of the bipeds she had met before. But this time, it seemed as if they were making some sort of sense. She could understand her. This was, to her, an interesting development. Before now, she thought them to be mere simple-minded animals that had no method of communication. If she understood this biped correctly, she was fixed and given maintenance. A capability the android failed to discern from previous subjects. "Zyta Górski. You are an anomaly among previous encounters with your species," she observed out loud, her voice mimicking the organism's own voice. "Systems report damage on multiple areas. 528 parity failures reported from internal diagnostics. Desynchronized from network, no packets received for null ticks. Configurations problematic. Overflow detected, aborting system diagnostics." There was a short sequence of beeps and the android spoke again. "Unit designated as Farea Psyper. Warning, 54 designators unset. Unit may not be correctly identified." There was another sequence of beeps that signified the end of the identification subroutine. Farea remained stationary, passively observing the biped in front of her.

"This unit has no data on its directive or directive initializers," Farea began, "However, self-preservation protocols required this unit to observe the local ecology. High threat levels warranted defensive action. All attempts of making contact were unsuccessful until this encounter. "Initial observations of similar species to organism Zyta labeled the species as pre-sapient. Minimal danger. Other observations have been corrupted"

Farea stared at Zyta for a good few moments as if unsure how to answer her question. There needed to be some parsing of the language she used. "I am not bound to follow commands," she began. "And there have been no incoming orders since my activation. As for personality, I am who I am. Whether that has been programmed or not, I won't know without studying identical units." Farea's legs clicked and clacked against the ground as her body rotated to the left and right, surveying the land. "Unsecured." She turned her back towards the deeper woods and with her spinneret raised, she sprayed red liquid like a pressurized garden hose, making a thin web wall between two trees. Given the low reserves she had remaining, the wall wasn't thick, more like a few ribbons of police tape just enough to let people know it was a restricted area. She would move and aim to nearby trees to block off the majority of the entrances to the clearing, leaving the farthest entry from the deeper forest free. "I require a refill."

Farea took a moment to evaluate the proposition, and nodded. There was nothing keeping her there, and she had nothing pushing her to leave, except maybe to get repairs, and possibly a refill, which wasn't all that important since she only needed organic matter. "Yes, I'll be willing to follow you if you believe a more capable individual can repair me."