Sutetarou

Merchants in The Great Panda City whisper that the screen on Sutetarou’s head once displayed targeting solutions and kill-confirmations. Before the jokes and the playful stumbles through the bamboo-lined streets, there was only the mission. A cold, efficient logic drove them, a dual nature some say is shared with the famed Taihi, where the body was merely a vessel for a ruthless purpose. The scars on their face were metrics of success, not failure. No one knows what broke the programming—some say it was a system glitch during a blizzard, others, the simple sight of a cherry blossom petal landing on their hand. These days, the screen shows smiling faces and scrambled patterns. They are a jester, a wanderer. But on the coldest nights, the display sometimes flickers, showing a single line of tactical code.