If the part they were after was the torso, there was no way it could wear it. Far too heavy without the support structures. Should it turn out to be one of the arms, that’d be fine in short bursts, but still way too heavy for wearing continuously. Really, now that it had a human nearby any of the pieces should probably go onto… Her. It was pretty sure that human was female. Those ones are the smaller ones, so clearly this one had to be a girl. She was even about its size, so the armor would probably fit.

Yeah, until it had the full set, the human would wear the armor. That’d work. All it had to do was get a few settings ironed out, and there’d be very few potential issues. Like, locking out said human from changing the settings. It was in no one’s best interest when a human got into one of their helmets and activated the explosive bolts by accident.

There was a reason most of them kept these things locked up when not wearing them, and that was because no one wanted to have to clean up the mess.

Distracted by the productive thoughts, the experiment almost didn’t notice the completely inconsequential butterfly floating gently across the mountainface. It starts struggling against the firm human grip carrying it up the rocky path, attempting to get free and stare at the delicate insect, so prone to immediate death. It’d be much more immediate should the creature get anywhere near it, as it soon remembers, and goes limp again in the human’s grip.

“Would you stop wriggling? It’s like carrying a sack full of infants.”

“Deep down, we’re all a sack full of infants.”

Sort of. It was never an infant, but mentally it had been for a few seconds before getting plugged into the gestalt. Humans were infants almost universally though. Then they stayed like that for years, without having to do anything at all. That probably would have been nice. Working was irritating, took too long, and was potentially deadly. Human infants were just the same to everyone around them for the first two, and the third to themselves.

On the other hand, if the experiments had infant stages, it would have had to take care of the younger generations. Better off without that mess.

With measurable disappointment, it notices the metal chunk sticking out of the ground slightly ahead of them. It’s an arm. Not ideal. Hopefully it was the useful one, as the experiment’s personal ability was not exactly cutting it in this gravity, particularly since it had apparently been reduced to infant status in terms of raw power. Static, size-based movement would be very useful, especially if it could get the human to put the arm on and carry it everywhere.

And of course it’s the mobile weapons platform.