"Jessie!" Windchime called when he saw her. "Nice of you to join us again. I hope you enjoyed your beauty sleep."
"I did, thanks," Jessica13 said and studied her surroundings before she picked one of the pieces up. Her own mech was fairly unique from a mechanic viewpoint but was nowhere near as interesting as the one Windchime piloted, and it earned her little attention from the locals.
Besides, they had already seen her wandering around the place two days earlier. Her Minato was old news to them.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to leave you in the lurch," she continued and handed the part to the man who worked on the tower. She meant her apology, even though she didn’t regret the sleep. There was so much to be done and leaving them to take the whole load felt a little unfair.
"Never you mind that," her teammate replied. "I'll tease you about it, sure, but we all need to reload and recharge from time to time. You're no good to anyone if you keel over from lack of food and sleep. Know your limits and try to push them from time to time, but you learn after a while how to not abuse your body too much."
"Thanks," she said with a smile. "I don't mind the teasing, honestly, but I do feel bad about leaving all the work to you folks while I was getting my beauty sleep."
She'd heard him and others use the term before and like so many others, it seemed a little odd since it was her experience that she and all others looked horrible when they woke.
"So, what have we been working toward out here?" Jessica13 asked as they continued to work together.
Windchime shrugged and the exaggerated action of his mech made the children laugh. "They're still trying to decide what kind of reward they think they can spare for us. We expended considerable resources to get here, so Hammerhand has tried to leverage the position, but our main priority will be to head out and give Athena more grief before too long. If we keep her busy, she won’t be able to focus on this little patch of paradise."
"Who is Athena?" one of the nearby children asked, overhearing their conversation.
"It's the goddess Athena," an older girl said and regarded her companion with something that might have been disappointment. "You know, the one in the books?"
"But they talked about giving Athena grief," the smaller child countered. "You can't give a goddess grief. It's unpossible."
"Impossible," the other corrected and rolled her eyes.
"You know her as Lady Hoot," Jessica13 explained. "We know her as Athena. She gave us some grief in the past, and when we saw she was giving you the same, we thought we'd return the favor."
"Oh!" the little one exclaimed. "Why do you call her Athena, then? She has the owl on her mech and that makes her Lady Hoot."
Jessica13 opened her mouth to speak but shut it when she realized she had no real answer. She wasn't actually sure why they called her Athena. Maybe it was her real name or maybe it was a nickname. In fact, she hadn't even known it was the name of a goddess until the child had mentioned it.
Thankfully, Windchime was quick to step in. "The goddess Athena of times past was said to ride a mech in the sky above us and made her home in the mountains. She's said to have an owl companion that told her everything there was to know in the world. Maybe the owl was an AI-operated mech that gathered information for her. Either way, the woman we call Athena carved the owl's head into her helm and abandoned her past and her name in favor of using the name of the goddess she claimed to represent."
The children leaned in, entranced by the story, and had no idea at all that he didn't want to discuss the woman any further.
"And…well, I guess all that would have been a little too long and drawn out to explain," he said and looked a little uncomfortable. "So, she let you call her Lady Hoot and left it at that."
"I’m not sure why," the smaller child said. "I think Athena is much nicer than Lady Hoot."
Windchime scowled and shook his head, and Jessica13 laughed.
"Leave it to children to take the niceness of the names away from what you told them," she said, still snickering.
"Whatever," he grumbled. He looked like he needed time asleep as well, although it was difficult to tell if it was because he had just woken up himself or because he had been up all night. "All we know is that the woman needs to be stopped, not what kind of name suits her best."
Given what he'd told her about taking care of herself and getting rest when she needed it, she imagined that if he hadn't taken some time to sleep in his hybrid mech, he soon would.
"I heard from Tinker and Hammerhand that we will abandon our search for Citta del Mar for the moment to deal with Athena," she said softly as they returned to work. "They said it could take months and maybe even years to fully remove her from here, but Tinker thought it was important that there was a large population in this area they hadn't known about."
"Oh, right. He's not quite right in the head, but he has something of an ambition to record the numbers of humans in this area to make sure we know how many humans do actually live out here."
"But what does that have to do with the Citta del Mar?" Jessica13 asked.
"Well, the more folks there are in an area, the higher the chance is that someone's heard something, seen something, or knows of something we don't," Windchime explained as she climbed out of her Minato and
