Who the hell is xOxO . . .

. . . and what does she know about our Lily?

Ok, that's not really right. I've met xOxO before. Back when I first came to Hale's she was around occasionally, but I never really talked to her. And now, coming back from the Wastes with Imrhien while Lily bolted off, nekkid, to try and find her Daddy? It's got me wondering who she is, and why she knows so goram much about my Deputy.

General was sitting around the office talking with me the other morning, as he's been doing off and on of late, when xOxO showed up and said Hi. She asked a lot of questions about things that had been going on the last few months. No real surprise considering how long she'd been off the grid. General and I filled her in on most of the mundane goings on, and some of the more major events that'd happend to the folk that call Hale's Moon home. A lot had happened over the last few months.

As we got to talking, the subject of Lily came up and that's when things god painful. xOxO seemed to be figuring Lily was probably dead, or taken by slavers out in the Wastes. Both possibilities got my temperature up. But what threw me was the revelation that xOxO's brother, Mindo, was on the Blue Sun genetic engineering team that put her together. She seemed real surprised to find out just how Human General and I thought she was. How whole a person Lily'd become. xOxO seemed downright shocked to learn that Lily showed signs of caring for folk, and how much she'd come to mean to the town.

Don't know how or why she knew, but xOxO said Lily only had a six month span before she'd need the collar - some kind of biomedical device that would stabilize her hormones. Speaker cooked up something that stabilized her for a spell, but said himself it wouldn't be permanent - or go crazy with some kind of mating frenzy that's ultimately be her undoing. Don't know how much of it was even true. Only thing I knew was xoxo seemed to know a lot about our Lily, didn't think she was in a good place, and wasn't in a position to go looking for her.

Neither General or I were especially happy about what xoxo said. Couldn't hold it against her, really, though the paranoid retired black ops side of me kept thinking it might be some kind of elaborate trap to goad us into searching for Lily. Whether it was or not, that was what we were going to do.

We wouldn't have a lot of time or resources to devote. Certainly not enough for a proper search, but General had decent ground tracking skills and I had usable sensor and EW pods I could mount on Wave Equation. If the tracks were still fresh enough where Lily took off, General might be able to follow her. Otherwise, we could hope her signature was unique enough, even in the Wastes, that the sensor pod could get a fix.

Alive or dead, I was tired of not knowing.