Nearly everyone's hand shot up, which resulted in the entire team getting ready and heading out. Leta saw this as a great moment to try and experiment on absorbing nanites.
"Uh… I think I'm gonna stay here." Leta said with an apologetic smile.
"Awww… Why don't you come with us?" moaned Pillar, lips pouted in surprisingly genuine disappointment as the team got dressed for a night out.
"Yeah. They singled me out to stall the team and have shown they aren't afraid to do things out in the open. It might be safer if I stay close and out of public view."
"That's not a bad idea." Dr. Galloise nodded in agreement, coat in hand as everyone started to make their way out the door. "Would you like us to bring you back anything?"
"Oh, no! Don't worry about me." Leta responded, trying her best to act innocent, "I saw there were some snacks in the fridge so I'll just eat something here and do some research online."
Dr. Galloise looked to the bowl of fruit on the small dining room table, then back to her before shrugging, "Okay, if you're sure. Don't forget to lock up before you get to bed. We'll see you later."
Leta watched from the window as the team left down the road for the metro, holding her breath and hoping that no one would turn around because they'd forgotten something.
When she saw the group turn a corner, she headed over to the dining room table and stared intently at the bowl of fruit.
"Okay, Gada. How do I absorb nanites?"
[FIRST, THE HOST MUST TOUCH THE TARGETED MATTER.]
Leta reached for the apple and held it up to get a better look.
[APPLE. UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 2]
[ABSORB UNPROGRAMMED NANITES? YES/ NO]
"Are you kidding me?! That's barely anything!"
Leta wanted to throw the apple across the room in frustration. If she wanted to raise just one point on her stats, she'd have to consume 500 apples.
[FLORA AND FAUNA ARE SOME OF THE MOST GENETICALLY ENGINEERED MATTER IN THE UNIVERSE. GENETIC MANIPULATION AND SELECTIVE BREEDING HAVE CREATED MODERN SPECIES WITH SIGNIFICANTLY LOW NUMBERS OF UNPROGRAMMED NANITES].
"Argh!" Leta grumbled, her fingernails digging into the delicate flesh of the fruit.
[WHILE LOW IN UNPROGRAMMED NANITES, THE MATTER CAN BE USED AS AN EXERCISE IN NANITE ABSORPTION.]
With a huff, Leta nodded and mentally selected 'yes' on the absorption prompt.
[UNPROGRAMMED NANITE ABSORPTION COMPLETE. CURRENT UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 509.]
And thus, Leta began absorbing all the available nanites in the dining room.
[APPLE. UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 2]
[APPLE. UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 2]
[ORANGE. UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 4]
[BANANA. UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 3]
After raiding the fruit bowl of whatever unprogrammed nanites she could get her hands on, she quickly moved to the refrigerator, but learned that processed items such as pasta noodles, soda, and cold cuts, were completely void of unprogrammed nanites.
She was beginning to lose hope when she came across a half dozen eggs in a Styrofoam carton.
[CHICKEN EGG. UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 10]
"Score!" Leta cheered, and quickly went to work absorbing the nanites.
[CURRENT UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 580.]
"Still scraping the barrel." She mused, but Gada provided some words of encouragement.
[LIVING MATTER FROM ANIMALS WILL GENERALLY HAVE A HIGHER NUMBER OF NANITES, AMONG THEM UNPROGRAMMED NANITES THAT CAN BE ABSORBED. WHILE THE COLD CUTS HAVE BEEN PROCESSED TO THE POINT THAT ALL UNPROGRAMMED NANITES HAVE BEEN REMOVED, A LARGER PIECE OF FRESH MEAT WOULD HOLD MORE UNPROGRAMMED NANITES THAN EGGS.]
"So I could hit up a butcher and absorb them that way."
Smiling with a budding sense of hope, she grabbed her phone and looked up the closest butcher shop.
It was a Thursday, and the sun had just begun to set over the acropolis when Leta had dressed and snuck out of the apartment.
Most of the butcher's closed at 6 p.m., so she had less than an hour to run to the closest shop half a mile down the street.
Though a bit overweight, she felt surprisingly good as she jogged the streets of Athens. Gada had informed her that her stamina score of 10 was average for an unactivated human, but Leta was sure that her score would have been much lower before getting injected by 5000 year old icor.
Leta arrived at the shop with ten minutes to spare and ordered laimos, or beef chuck meat, and what amounted to three pork chops, since that was all that she could afford with the money she had on her.
She felt silly walking back to the apartment carrying a bunch of meat, but then paused and headed north towards Lycabettus Hill. Leta did not want to be absorbing nanites in public, and she didn't want to make multiple trips back to the apartment if this turned out to be a wasted effort.
The setting sun cast the park in shades of purple and gold, lengthening the shadows of the trees and giving the woods an otherworldly feel.
Turning from the main road, a cactus lined foot path provided an excellent view of the Acropolis in the distance as the lights of Athens flickered like fireflies into existence.
Leta hadn't passed another person for some time and stopped to unwrap her spoils.
[BOVINE MEAT. UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 110]
[ABSORB UNPROGRAMMED NANITES? YES/ NO]
"Still not a lot, but a hell of a lot more than fruit." Leta grumbled, but resigned herself to picking up a more carnivorous diet if it meant getting stronger.
She watched in morbid fascination as the meat in her hand seemed to dim, the vibrant red of the muscle fibers losing its luster like someone had desaturated it in a photo editing program.
[SWINE MEAT. UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 67]
[SWINE MEAT. UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 72]
[SWINE MEAT. UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 70]
[ABSORB UNPROGRAMMED NANITES? YES/ NO]
[CURRENT UNPROGRAMMED NANITES: 899]
"319 nanites for 45 euros… This is really gonna suck my savings account dry." She bemoaned.
Leta was mentally figuring out how she was going to explain to her parents that she wanted to invest in a butcher shop when she felt the hairs on the back of her arms stand straight and a sense of foreboding had her heart picking up speed.
Was it just here, or did the air suddenly feel still?
And why had the birds stopped their sundown chatter?
Deciding it was time to high tail it out of there, she turned to head back up the path towards the public areas when she saw a man walking her way from that director.
Dressed in disheveled pants and a shirt that had once been white before it had been stained and torn, everything in her screamed 'danger danger'.
Even from a distance, she could see his eyes were amber gold, and the closer he approached the more she realized his irises were too big, the gold taking up more space than the whites.
His patchy beard and straggly hair made him look like a wild animal, and as his lips pulled back to reveal sharp teeth and long canines, she realized that that wasn't far from the truth.