After seeing her brethren co-conspirator safely to his hideaway –from an acceptable, which in this case means impractical, distance, of course– Yolanda was engaged in her other pursuit –namely the pursuit of the other sensory field generator in this godforsaken backwater.

Everybody usually had some sensory equipment, but there were few who had gone as far as Yolanda. She had enough physical field spikes to do a little, sure, but even using them was really a misuse of an extremely expensive and powerful array of spikes designed primarily for the purpose of sensing. She was, in essence, a finely tuned machine. She could detect a heartbeat near ten kilometers away –though noise often got in the way of such useless sales pitches.

Usually, sensory field generation is actually reception – that is, after all, mostly what even bodily sense is. But in cases in which there was particular difficulty gaining a clear sense of what was going on with merely passive circuits, then the possibility of generation became important. Sometimes, in order to receive a signal, one first had to send one out. It was the same as any reflective based detection system. Thus while half of her arrays were excellent receivers of all kinds of fielded information, the other half of her arrays were dedicated to the subtle and near-undetectable deployment of sensory fields themselves. Fields that allowed her incredibly detailed and rich information about places that could be far out of sight or hidden behind thick walls. There were all sorts of problems with the use of such a field – not the least of which was sensory overload in the attempt to receive back the reflected signal. But another no less dangerous problem was that while the fields were mostly undetectable to normal field generators, to other sensory-types it may be apparent that someone was trying to spy.

When she had first arrived at this godforsaken settlement, she had foolishly used her field with impunity, hardly imagining that there would be anyone here with the money or the will to implant an array that was in any way comparable to her own. Thus she was shocked, ashamed at her naivety, and somewhat overwhelmed when her flippant field generation resulted in her being hunted. She had a hard time escaping from those thugs, and she had to do it all on passive sensory reception, trying her best to evade a force under the command of one who, it became extremely clear to her, was a sensory field generator of no small talent.

And so, in the subtle wars waged by the sensory rather than the physical, Yolanda went into ambush mode. But the problem was that even after she had escaped and then gone out to gather information in order to teach this upstart a lesson, the other sensory field generator turned out not to be so easy to catch off guard and deal with. She was, instead, someone enormously influential in the underground, the owner or at least the manager of a large underground system of distribution and services, and she was constantly guarded. Yolanda didn’t even have to search long to find her – she was, after all, using her field with an impunity equal to Yolanda’s own. The difference was that Yolanda had no army with her to back her up at the moment. That army was elsewhere, and she had already tried betraying them once and would rather not rely on them. Hunting someone like her would be pointless in this situation, as those thugs surrounded her day and night, and Yolanda didn’t have the capacitance or the arrays to deal with such a force. In a manner contrary to Yolanda, this woman would walk boldly down the walkways, as if daring people to try and stop her. And behind her would walk a veritable armoured guard. Her name was Arleigne, and she was the queen of nefarious occurences in the town. Once Yolanda had found all this, she realised it was probably pointless to go against her. The town was as good as hers, and Yolanda hadn’t been sure what to do about her after that. Arleigne hadn’t even really been serious about hunting Yolanda, rather, it seemed, she had simply been annoyed at someone similarly powerful being so loud around her territory.

And so in order that she would know what to do with her in the future, Yolanda, ever careful, had kept track of Arleigne, who she assumed was the greatest danger to her in this settlement. She wasn’t sure if Areigne knew her face, or even cared about her existence. But this was one point where Yolanda differed from this big fish in a small pond. Yolanda knew that information was the currency of a sensory field generator, not power. She knew what true power looked like, and she shivered involuntarily when she thought about it, and she knew the strength of those, like the brethren, who could even consider moving against it. And both those forces had employed her. Not to be powerful, not to be strong. They employed her to find things out. To be honest, Yolanda now thought a few well placed explosives would undermine, or at least weaken, Arleigne’s entire operation. Because by now, Yolanda knew it like the back of her hand, and she knew all of its vulnerabilities.

So Yolanda often joined Arleigne on her ‘patrols’, travelling from one warehouse to another, from one whore-house to a drinking shack to a restaurant to a cafe. She was a busy lady, Arleigne, and Yolanda made sure to stay up to date with what she was up to. The knowledge made her feel secure, and let her know all sorts of other dealings that were going on in the settlement. She was meant to be here to find out things after all, though she had abandoned her mission by not reporting that there were brethren here.

But at the moment Yolanda was puzzled. Arleigne often watched the pillars outside of the settlement as she was intensely interested in the comings and goings of all the people of the settlement, and so today Arleigne had done her usual sweep, and Yolanda had felt the vague scintillating pressure of her scan. By now, Yolanda could piggy back of Alrleigne’s scans. She could effectively use the other woman’s scans as her own, though it was never in the right place or at the right time, and the signal was encoded in a particular way that made it difficult to understand all the information it was gathering. But she had gone some way to uncovering what Arleigne was seeing, and every time Yolanda did so, she smirked. At this moment she was near enough to Arleigne that the image she received was clear and without distortion. The thing that puzzled Yolanda was that Arleigne soon did another scan, and then another, growing more and more focused as she did, narrowing in on something. It was such a narrow scan that Yolanda couldn’t feel the reflections bouncing back to her anymore. And so, as Yolanda couldn’t extend her own field, she instead lowered the threshold of her sensitivity, trying to pick up the fainter echoes of Arleigne’s now quite directional signal. She started back in surprise at what she found. It was like encountering an antique in a second hand shop. There was a person wearing a windsuit approaching the settlement. An actual windsuit, and they were using it to actually fly.

As far as Yolanda knew, windsuits had gone out with the middle wire age and the development of spikes, but here was someone wearing one in this day and age. She was surprised. And she was also surprised at Arleigne’s interest in it. Why would she care if some eccentric had strapped themselves into an antique and dove into the mists?

She nearly slapped her head as she figured it out. That figure wasn't just some eccentric. It was someone who genuinely didn’t have any spikes. If she’d been able to deploy her own field, she could have probably found out herself. Even if they didn’t have spikes, It certainly wasn’t the brethren, they had no need for such devices as windsuits. Nor was it anyone else who knew the ways of cable city. Those without spikes who wanted to stay that way – corporeal puritans and the like, they travelled in packs, and were heavily armed to stop any opportunists. This was someone who Arleigne was interested in for one specific reason, and it was the reason the puritans were heavily armed, and that reason was that Arleigne was a human harvester, who drugged people without too many surgeries under their belt and stole their organs for wealthy clients, or forwent the drugging and just tore out their internals. And the person approaching in the windsuit didn’t have a single surgical implant of spikes. That meant that whoever it was, they would soon end up with their first surgical scars, and probably with a body weight that had been halved thanks to the number of organs Arleigne would remove from such an untouched specimen.