The well-rounded smile turns into a grin after a few 'ticks'. "Hah! You... like to
drink apples, then? ... we'd like to see how that happens at some point!", they ask with slightly pursed lips.
The bartender actually preparing a good tar special just for them makes the grin grow even wider, and Feature's soon looking around for some honey - since beeswax was not that easy to find in taverns from their experience. "Ne'er had any allergies, no!" Disorderly things happening, though... but that'd come up soon enough.
They hear the story on the Ibbanese fisherman with great attention and pleasure as they wait for their drink, nodding and widening their eye here and there. "They sound fascinating, these Ibbanese folks! And... that all you learned from a book, then? Where is that continent, then? It sounds like a fun place to visit! Maybe we should at some point!" - who they meant by 'we' in that case not entirely clear, as Naila may notice. Who knew seeing yourself as a plural and speaking a language without clusivity distinctions could lead to such conundrums?
The Monodrone then follows the clarification on Naila's surname closely, even gesturing to one side and the other, even mimicking a tower with a falling ball of lead (much larger than usual shot balls - they probably didn't understand exactly what the tower was for) and what looked like them injecting something on their own round belly (is it a belly if there's no waist?). "One, one...Droot'en! We're sorry, ms Droot'en, and thanks! We won't forget now!"
The whole mimicking and commenting ceases, and even the silly smile calms down a bit as they settle down to hear Naila's story - and that they do attentively and respectfully. Their smile
does widen when the elven-like lady's voice becomes more somber, which ought to be slightly disconcerting. But they still keep quiet and even seems sympathetic, despite the odd smile. Maybe it was meant to cheer her up or something?
The end of the story and the mug of tar coming in at the same time makes the smile become a grin again, then a muffled laughter. "That's a Ribcage of a story!", they say - probably more acquainted with the gate-town than with the Hells it led to. "One might even say Ms Droot'en was half-born a detective - or, well, the center of a detective story! Your father sounds like a fine, canny man!"
A long gulp of tar follows - which actually doesn't seem to drain so much of the mug, perhaps not surprisingly - couldn't be easy to chug down something that viscous. The Monodrone seems rather happy as they put the mug back down, down.
"We... well, back then we were an overseer at sector 2463579235463, as we said." Naila may notice they used the word
she said for their role and the slight change in the sector number.
"At some point, a
long time after the last time such a thing had happened, we saw a visitor on the horizon, and went to do the same thing protocol always dicatated - report it to our supervisor. Only this time there wasn't a single supervisor there."
Their smile seems to grow wider, although the look in their eye doesn't quite agree with it.
"There were
three. And even more strangely... two of them seemed more powerful than the other one! In fact...they seemed more powerful than any duodrones we'd seen before, we're 84% certain!" They say in a somewhat rote fashion, their grin growing wider.
The 'normal' duodrone then gave us an order that was similar to all other times - 'watch the visitor, relay the information if they move, warn us if they enter your sector'. Which we were ready and willing to do, as always!
But then one of the two powerful supervisors looked pensively towards the horizon and determined - 'go to the visitor, talk to them and make peace.' Which we were ready and willing to do as well!
And then the other beefy monodrone stared towards the horizon and determined - 'rush to them, drive them off OR exterminate!'. Which we were... well, we wanted to follow orders!
But there were three sets of deterministically, logically determined orders! How could we?"
Feature's grin grew wider and wider, and their eye was open so wide it looked as if it should pop out, if such a thing was even possible for such an anatomy.
"It... it was something entirely new. 'Uncertainty'! We had to 'decide'! Consider the 'chance' we were choosing the right thing! It was a completely new idea... it was an IDEA! Had we had ideas before? 75% we hadn't! Which of course also meant we probably wouldn't be good at it. Roughly 33% chance of doing the right chance there, I wager!"
A silly laugh, and their eye seems to relax slightly. "We decided to go out and talk. Of course we didn't know
what to talk about. But the Visitor, they were interesting! And nice! In the end they made us think about our orders, about what answers and orders are, and the like. It was all too complicated at the time, too much, even. But there wasn't much time for that, in the end. We turned back with the visitor, there was another monodrone in our sector, and as soon as I tried to step back into my sector it started." The monodrone's eye is suddenly tense again, even more than before. They said we were defective. A failure. An error.
They wanted to take us for repairs, but we knew we weren't defective! When we tried to say so, a cluster of monodrones bolted towards us, aggressive, all repeating the same thing: 'Failure!' 'Error'! 'Bug!!'"
The grin wider than ever, something oily seems to drop from the big eye.
"The visitor... they helped us. Ran with us, guided us towards a gate, then laughed when we got to Sigil even as they kept asking us more and more questions - saying now and again we were 'fascinating'" They stopped for a while, head tilted, grinning again. "Oh... just as Ms Droot'en said when we met outside, in fact!"
Some low whirring and click clacks. "hm.... Zero. Half-half?", they muttered to themselves.
"They kept with us a few more days", they then continued. "To 'make sure we were functional', they said. Gave us a number of books, and... made us keen on asking questions ourselves, we suppose! Then they just left, and we've been trying to find our way ever since!"
"We don't know that we've found a way... but we met some folks here and there! One of them, a half-orc, even reassured us we weren't a 'bug' - we were a 'Feature'!" The monodrone gives a hippity hop at that. "That's not much sense, but it's something, right? And we found things to do, soup to feed, sods to help. It gets tedious at times, but it's something, and sometimes it's fun!"
The clean smile they end the story with seems somehow purer than any others on the round face before - and maybe more worrying exactly for that reason.
"But do tell, Ms Droot'en! You said we could discuss work? Were you on a case? Do you need a case cracked, or retrieved?", they say, the troubling grin coming back, maybe a bit too fast.