Episode 6.2 - What a Beach Episode?! Now, here, of all places? With a Demon Girl! - Part 2/2

Leaving behind our ad hoc beach picnic and descending the grassy slope of the hill our Fortress sits upon, we make quick progress over to the barrier wall; our way guide marked by a crowd of tense Estolpfo - weapons drawn no less, a collection of short, sharp spears and curved, gleaming scimitars.
     We all recognise what's approaching; we last saw them just a week ago, on the rooftop. I only know them by nerd-osmosis, ‘Drone-Scouts’ units from a video game called WarLands by the same studio that made Escape. A weird genre mash of command&conquer, post-apocalypse survival and a shooter game. I never played it personally, though I know Sek dabbled in it a bit.

When these metallic-silver stickmen appeared last, they teleported right at us. I still remember Lady Lila crushing their entire second wave with her bare hand. In that sense, it's not a very intimidating sight, two dozen tin men clanking across the plains towards us. Where they step, the grass is left with minor depressions from their weight, small flowers and tufts of weeds squashed to a pulp. What is disconcerting is the idea that they are just scouts, that a whole army of higher-level ‘mobs’ from that game could be coming...

"Will they see the barrier?" Sek asks as we stand just inside it, watching the robots approach.
The barrier was originally very visible, a dark translucent green box of protection, but over time, it became less visible. Lila explained that this is hard-baked into the spell, to make it less of an eyesore. She claims it's a waste of mana, but I rather appreciate not having to look at a giant box reminder that the rest of the world is a wasteland. Oddly, the fading effect hasn't worked as well on Eshu; she claims to see it still quite clearly. Even Lila is stumped by that one, but now's hardly the time for that.

"Nah, even if they can't ‘see it’, they'll have some sort of 'sensor' as I understand it."

"How many do you think there are?" I feel a bit timid asking.

"Hmm? Oh, none at all, we'd have seen an army coming from miles away. Tom always has someone on watch duty. These are just some stranded scouts like the ones that attacked us before, likely without anyone left to give them orders.”

"Oh, well, that's good then," I sigh, relieved as you might imagine. A horde of killer robots doesn't sound like much fun.

At a uniform march, the metal men slowly come to a stop in neat rows, one metre exactly on the other side of the barrier.
     "Well, what's up?" Lila shouts, even her swimsuit can't undercut her when she's in business mode.

 The lead ‘man’ steps forward, although he looks much the same as all the others, a single black band around one arm is all that differentiates him.
“DESIGNATED AREA LAND OWNEEEEEEEER,” it says in a mechanical voice, slurring the last word slightly.

“Ya?”

The centremost robot's narrow head glows where a mouth would be, a faint orange colour as its distorted voice, like that from a really old speaker, emits: "WE REQUEST PASSAGEEEE. WE WILL TRAVEL SOUTH. WE HAVE NO DESIRE FOR CONFLICT."

"Yaaaaa, that's about what I figured you’d ask. Off with ya then, ruining my view. Leave us well enough alone, and we’ll do the same for you."

"UNDERSTOOD. WE WOULD FIRST RETURN YOUR SUBORDINAAAAAAATE.”
     There is a shuffling, and suddenly an Estolpfo is pushed to the front. I could swear the air around me becomes colder as Lila's body tenses. “Come,” she says simply, and the little guy wobbles with a terrible limp across the boundary onto our side. He's beat up bad, chipped fragments of bone all over, gashes and dents in his boney body - It's clear he’s been subject to quite the kicking.

“WE FOUND HIM LOST. WE HAVE RETURNEEEEED HIM. THAT IS ALL.”
They are not exactly chatty, are they? Still, their action says a lot more. It doesn’t take a detective to figure that they must have found this lone Estolpfo - probably out by where they’ve been querying rock for the windowmills - beaten him up and then handed back like this as some sort of power play.
     Just like that, they turn as one and begin a new march away from us, heading towards the massive mountain range that is all you can see south of our base. I look carefully at Lila's poker face following their retreat.

"What, that's it?" Sek says as the figures begin to get smaller in the distance. Tom trots over to the injured Estolpfo, and Sek bends down to pat it on the shoulder, too. For its part, it tries to look away, I think perhaps it's embarrassed or ashamed even. Poor little guy.
Tom clicks some sounds that seem conciliatory, but the lone warrior is having none of it, shaking its small, bashed and dented head.

"Oh, just for now. Once they build up their forces, they'll come back and try to take us down, I imagine. Further proof they have no real firepower right now, if they did, they wouldn't have asked us anything, they'd just invade. At least that's what I understand from the tutorial and the remains of the units on our roofs."

Sek seems to consider this as the only one who had at least in passing played the game the drones are from.
    Well, actually, I haven't asked Eshu if she played it. Still, she's never offered anything on it, so I'm just presuming she hasn't either - surprisingly not much of a gamer before coming to Escape, our Eshu.
     "Ya, that about tracks I’d say. The drones weren't complex machines in the game; if you didn't give them orders, they'd just follow basic protocols forever, setting up bases and attacking anything they deemed beatable. It was kind of a pain, sometimes you'd forget a unit and it would wander so far it alerted the enemy to your position.”

Lila nods, "Come on, let’s go inside and sketch up a plan, the Estoplfo will get antsy otherwise. Shouldn't take long, talk about a small fry threat,” she says, but I don't wholly buy it.

 There is a measured calmness to her voice. She floats down to the injured soldier and says something in their language that I can't understand, and then she hugs it. It's a bizarre image, a demon girl hugging a battered skeleton even shorter than she is. It's oddly tender to look at; her earnest face with a kindly expression, her hand gently rubbing what goes for its back. When she lets go and starts to float back to the fortress firmly, the Estolpfo in question looks a little more at peace, allowing Tom to take it by the shoulder and lead it off to rest, I presume. The other troops that had been gathered around have sheathed their weapons now that the threat has passed, and they crowd around, following along and offering what sounds like encouragement to their injured colleague in various clicky voices.