Oh, there are reasons he is not - mostly socially based, because Allen is not now and has never been a rally-the-troops type. That would require him to stop running calculations in his head for a couple of minutes to come up with a statistically guaranteed-to-be-rousing speech.
"I've used a bow, but I prefer guns. I'm very good with them. And as for close combat -" he laughs. "No, man. I will run to a safe shootin' distance if something big and smashy rears its head nearby."
He pulls one of his colts from their holsters, and does not hand it over, but holds it up for Sparkhawk's judgment. "I'm not gonna say this isn't my natural scardey-cat reflexes at work, but it's also a logical route of action. I am excellent with anything involving aiming, and I've always been safer picking enemies off at a distance, especially by myself. When I paired up with my wife, who is the best close-combat fighter I know, I was still always of better service picking off the ones she didn't see coming while she cut the ones she did see coming down up close and personal."
"As for the robots -" he pauses, thinking of how best to explain them. "You know what machines are? Robots are a kind of machine built to perform a certain task without humans having to repeatedly tell them what to do. A piece of machinery programmed to do a certain thing, such as build other machines, without humans having to be operating them by hand. Usually they're large enough to see, but the ones I have in my bloodstream are too small to be seen by the human eye. On this level, they're called nanobots, or nanites, and the ones in my blood continuously circle through my body, monitoring my physical condition, checking for and eliminating viruses, poisons, and other things that are not supposed to be there. They deliver status reports to my brain, which is also partially a machine, so that I have continuous knowledge of what is in my body and whether or not it should be there."
no subject
"I've used a bow, but I prefer guns. I'm very good with them. And as for close combat -" he laughs. "No, man. I will run to a safe shootin' distance if something big and smashy rears its head nearby."
He pulls one of his colts from their holsters, and does not hand it over, but holds it up for Sparkhawk's judgment. "I'm not gonna say this isn't my natural scardey-cat reflexes at work, but it's also a logical route of action. I am excellent with anything involving aiming, and I've always been safer picking enemies off at a distance, especially by myself. When I paired up with my wife, who is the best close-combat fighter I know, I was still always of better service picking off the ones she didn't see coming while she cut the ones she did see coming down up close and personal."
"As for the robots -" he pauses, thinking of how best to explain them. "You know what machines are? Robots are a kind of machine built to perform a certain task without humans having to repeatedly tell them what to do. A piece of machinery programmed to do a certain thing, such as build other machines, without humans having to be operating them by hand. Usually they're large enough to see, but the ones I have in my bloodstream are too small to be seen by the human eye. On this level, they're called nanobots, or nanites, and the ones in my blood continuously circle through my body, monitoring my physical condition, checking for and eliminating viruses, poisons, and other things that are not supposed to be there. They deliver status reports to my brain, which is also partially a machine, so that I have continuous knowledge of what is in my body and whether or not it should be there."
He waits to see if this made sense.