"You really thought that Gingerbread Man was special and figured out it was me?"
Rita could see how happy B8017913 was. She had a faint hunch there probably wasn't any real contract-based sensing, but she wasn't about to ruin the mood. What's wrong with making your friends happy? She nodded with ease and said, "Yeah. Just had a feeling it was you. You're nothing like the other Gingerbread Men."
B8017913: "She recognized me at a glance and said I'm different from the others."
D182263: "…Oh."
Honestly, not very interested.
B8017913: "She recognized me at a glance and said I'm different from the others."
D182263: "Please turn off your auto-reply. Thanks."
D182263 didn't quite know how to describe what it was feeling.
After hiding B8017913's ID, it retold the story in the mechanical group chat—though even if it hadn't hidden the name, the rules were clear: once bonded to a player, they couldn't share secrets about other machines or their human partners.