I can feel my mind working differently, now that I'm in a fight.
It's not subtle. No part of what I am now is particularly subtle, frankly. I drop onto the concrete and shatter it with my weight alone, the shock against my own fra barely noticeable. I could probably slap a nearby building and shatter the bricks—
The math checks out. Estimated durability based on material structure, likely thickness, and possible supporting elents indicates a greater than ninety-five percent probability of being able to force my way through the nearby walls with only minimal speed loss, or even break them to use them as projectiles—
Projectile usage isn't a good idea at this ti; the target is accelerating into a charge with both her shield and lance ready to cover vital areas. Brick shards and chunks lack the requisite mass to be a sufficient deterrent to the target's estimated montum at ti of impact. Dismissing possibility as a waste of resources.
—but that probably won't be useful unless she gets caught off-balance and I'm still at range.
—which is a bit terrifying to think about, considering that I don't want to hurt this girl despite the fact that I have to. Or, well… I kind of have to, anyway. My orders, after all, are to deter Veritas. That does not intrinsically require harming her; as long as I convince her to stand down and stop fighting, that is successfully deterring her.
The problem, of course, is that I'm a weapon incapable of willingly indicating to others that I can communicate at all. Convincing her to stand down with any thod other than violence is pretty unlikely to work given I can't access any. Instead, I have to roll with the least violent deterrent I can muster, which I guess would be… counterattacks? Throws? Trying to pin her so she can't move, maybe?
I'm running out of ti to think about it. The world isn't quite moving in slow motion, per se, but a split second is still a lot of ti for to think all of a sudden. It is not, unfortunately, a lot of ti to move, and if I want to not be impaled by a lance I definitely need to do that.
All the different ways I could dodge flash through my mind, with all their likely outcos based on how Veritas adjusts. She's performing a high-montum, long-range thrust with the primary objective of closing the gap; therefore, her capacity to adjust the direction of her strike is relatively low. There's a high probability that I'll be able to perform an optimal counter with only minimal movent, and a low probability that she will impale my head with her weapon.
Win-win. And the odds are entirely acceptable. A proper deterrent, after all, requires an overwhelming show of force. Taking risks to accomplish that is entirely within the spirit of lpone's order.
I shift my head to the side at the last mont, letting the lance thrust rush past my neck as I step into the attack, moving to grab her clothes and throw her over my shoulder. I can't just catch her and start a grapple here; she's going so fast that the sudden stop against my fra would be like crashing face-first into a wall, and that might give her a concussion. I redirect the montum instead, trying to toss her away from lpone but also away from anything she could crash into.
She squawks with surprise and tries to bash in the face with her shield when I grab her. I let go of her early to avoid getting hit (my calculations insist that I can take a hit from a wall but not a ten-year-old girl) and send her spinning through the air.
"Wɪɴɢ Sᴛᴇᴘ!"
Veritas twists in the air, a magic circle appearing behind her that she lands on feet-first, cushioning herself from the montum before leaping right back at a second ti with more or less the sa attack, charging directly at with the tip of her weapon. And I an, I guess it is a lance. That's… basically what it's for.
Not counting right now, I have been in an actual real-life fight maybe like once, when I was a child. Suffice to say I don't have much experience with this. The closest thing I have experience with is fighting video gas, and I'm not the sort of moron that thinks more than a couple of those skills are transferable. Even discounting the fact that I probably could pull off so crazy fighting ga attacks, I'm well aware that is not how real life combat works. But I know at least a little bit about the ntal part of a fight. And my instincts there are telling I have two options.
The first is to do exactly the sa thing I did before. Veritas, after all, is attacking with a thod that literally just failed to work. There's nothing stopping from repeating the situation, and as the old adage goes, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.' Veritas is a child and it is entirely possible she just doesn't know how to handle the move. The upside to this is that it's easy, effective, and doesn't show as much of my hand. The downside to this is that if she does have an answer to my dodge-and-throw counter, she could be baiting into committing to sothing that she is going to absolutely destroy.
So the other option is to mix it up. Being predictable against a strong opponent is a death sentence, because of exactly the issue I just described: if your opponent is confident they know exactly what you're going to do, they can counter it perfectly. I kind of get to cheat at this, though. My reaction tis are clearly way higher than the human norm, given the fact that I can just… have this entire thought process in my head without getting impaled. It makes the fight… weirdly not scary?
Anyway, being predictable is bad against an enemy that can exploit it, but… this kid is ten. It's probably best for to go with the first option and hope that my reaction tis allow to out-adjust any feints she attempts. After all, I'm trying to deter her. I'm trying to get her to stop fighting. And nothing, I an nothing, causes rage-quits quite like spamming.
I can do this. I don't have to hurt her. I don't.
I dodge the thrust in the sa way as before, stepping just enough to the side so I can grab her as her montum forces her to overextend. And again, I get a fistful of her shirt—
A normal shirt would imdiately rip under these forces. This outfit is conjured and reinforced by magic.
—and toss her away from lpone, twisting her body so she can't try to strike with her shield this ti. Hehe. Get rotated, idiot.
Man, I should really not be spending ntal resources thinking up jokes about beating up a child. Speaking of resources, my power reserves have been slowly dropping since this started. I'm down to twenty-eight percent. My core temps are heating up, my inbuilt cooling spells are kicking in to compensate—
Oh shit, I can do magic! Or at least my body can.
—and even though I'm burning literally all of my fear for power, I'm still losing energy rapidly because fear has been steadily dropping for a while now. I'm getting resigned to my situation very quickly, as I have a lot of experience with that sort of thing. Still, keeping this up will cause to run out of power very quickly. I'll have to try and speed the fight up.
An increasingly frustrated look gathering on her face, Veritas twists in the air and jumps off of her magic circle to rush at again. I think I've given her a bit of tunnel vision. At this point I could kill her very easily. Given her recorded mana density and the degree of strain observed when she reverses her direction like that, I could almost certainly catch her head and use a combination of my strength and her montum to snap her neck, guaranteeing her death by paralyzing her heart and likely giving enough ti to fling her away before she could attack with the remainder of her available magic in her death throes.
The thought passes through my mind with disturbing ease, as if it were natural. I can envision it in my head, I know how I would need to move and when. My thoughts stall, my processing power wasted on replaying that mory over and over, and the callousness with which I thought it. I never would have, never could have thought about a life that way before I turned into this. I didn't know how to fight and I definitely didn't want to. But now? It's part of . It didn't feel like so rogue program injected that plan into my head, it felt like I thought that, because I'm the program. And I'm coded to know how to fight, efficiently and brutally and in any engagent my master desires.
lpone is right. I'm not a person. I am a weapon.
Veritas is crashing down diagonally towards , and I could just keep repeating my harmless throws. But I have a better option, don't I? I step a little further to the side, letting her crash directly into the ground, her lance impaling the asphalt of the road a good two feet deep. It doesn't even slow her down, though. She twists around, ripping her weapon from the ground and scattering chunks of road everywhere as she swings the lance like a club to smash against . I open the thruster compartnts on my back and lower calves, forcing my body forward to her opposite side with a powerful burst of concentrated mana, the acceleration from which would likely have killed just a day ago. I twist around, stopping myself much the sa way I started myself as I lean down and latch my limbs around Veritas's arms, locking her limbs in place and covering her mouth. She struggles and kicks , but it doesn't do much. Most of her power is concentrated into her lance and shield, and I've disabled her ability to hit with them.
It's probably fairly painful for her.
I'm not… I'm not going out of my way to hurt her or anything. Quite the opposite, in fact: I'm doing my best to apply the minimum force necessary to restrain her. It just turns out that the minimum force necessary to restrain a magical girl is a lot.
"Aaahahaha! Wonderful, wonderful!" lpone cheers, clapping like she's at a show. "Did you see that, Thea!? That was incredible!"
I don't want your praise. Even if… I an, it is kind of insane that all of this just happened. That I can just… do this now. It's an odd sensation. I've never been powerful before.
But I've always wanted to be.
"I… gosh," Thea agrees quietly. "Okay. Uh. Wow. I guess I'll just…"
She hops down off of her levitating barrier, dropping in front of the fog gate and rummaging around inside it until she pulls out the device she placed on the ground earlier, before we went inside. This seems to make Veritas even more angry, if her ever-greater struggles and the muffled, enraged screaming behind my hand are anything to go by.
"You use that lance like a complete amateur," lpone tells Veritas, staring down at us with a self-satisfied smile. "It's a bit embarrassing to watch. Of course, even if you had so degree of competence, you would have lost the mont you let rile you up."
Veritas' eyes go wide, freezing her struggles for a split second out of shock and, I'm fairly sure, sha.
"You're blue, not red," lpone presses, her smile slowly twisting from amusent to an almost offended sneer. "Anger isn't your emotion. If you can't even rember why you fight, you shouldn't show up to fight at all."
Thea stuffs the device back into a pocket and hops back up on her barrier platform, giving lpone a sidelong look.
"So, uh, now what?" she asks. "What do we do with her?"
"Well, it wouldn't be a bad idea to take her prisoner," lpone hums. "She likely has a lot of information on the current movents of the Preservers, and I doubt it will be difficult making her talk."
"...Oh," Thea mutters. "Uh… what if instead we—"
The conversation effectively halts from my perspective, my clock speed instantly spinning back up to combat mode as my sensors detect sothing approaching at high speeds from behind. I turn to look towards it, spotting two more ten-year-old girls flying through the air towards us. Or, I suppose more accurately, there's one girl flying towards us and another hanging off of her, clasping wrist-to-wrist so she doesn't fall and splat against the pavent below.
The flying girl is, obviously, a magical girl. She's got an extrely similar outfit to Veritas, but with green on all her colored accents instead of blue. To my surprise, though, the gem clasping the ribbon on her chest isn't green, but actually a weird muddy brown. It strikes as odd. Magical girls (and monster girls) have always been pretty on-point with the color theming. In the hand that's not holding her companion, she grips sothing that looks as though it might be a gun, like a very long rifle that's unnaturally thin. So thin, in fact, that it doesn't seem like it has room for a barrel of any kind. Her long, wavy brown hair billows behind her as she rockets towards us, my eyes clearly able to pick up the terrified expression on her freckled face.
The girl hanging off of her also looks worried, but from the way her gaze is laser-focused on Veritas I suspect it isn't because she's currently being treated like a stuffed animal being held out of the window of a moving car. Her warm brown skin is lighter than Veritas', and her chin-length black hair seems to be holding up in the wind a lot better than her companion's. And they are definitely companions; despite her lack of costu, she's clearly also a magical girl. Clutched tightly in her free hand, a soft yellow stone glows slightly in her grip. It has more of an orange tint to it than the other yellow stones I've seen, but it's definitely predominantly a warm yellow.
"Rember the plan!" the already-transford girl shouts. "I'm sending you in, Aurora!"
"Ready!" the other girl—Aurora, presumably—confirms, and her partner heaves her, sending her flying through the air directly at us.
"¡Lᴀs Pʀᴏᴛᴇɢᴇʀᴇ́!" Aurora shouts, and explodes into a shining light.
Her transformation is much like Veritas' was, wrapping her up in boots and gloves with her color, a skirt and a simple top in white, and finally a bow to house her transformation stone in the center of her chest. But after all that completes, sothing else starts forming over her hands: an extra set of fingerless gloves, dangerous-looking protrusions erging from the knuckles. They glow slightly after manifesting into being, and in front of them two orbs of light erge, each about the size of her tiny fists. They quickly circle her in a dramatic flourish, leaving beautiful trails of yellow light behind wherever they travel.
"Lᴏᴠɪɴɢ Sᴀᴠɪᴏʀ Pʀᴏᴛᴇᴄᴛᴏʀ Aᴜʀᴏʀᴀ!" she declares as the transformation finishes, and like Veritas a shockwave bursts out around her at the end of the transformation, but after getting yeeted straight at it's actually close enough to push away, my feet scraping the ground as I'm forced backwards despite my weight. Then, she inhales, likely to incant another spell.
I could kill Veritas before she finishes speaking. It would be easy. Does she not realize that? Murder clearly isn't in the spirit of lpone's order, but this girl doesn't know that. Does she just not understand the fact that I have a hostage? I could break a limb or two as a reminder, I suppose.
I…
No. No, no, no. What the fuck is wrong with ? This is a child.
"¡Fᴜᴇʀᴢᴀ Aʀᴅɪᴇɴᴛᴇ!" Aurora screams, and I brace myself for an attack that doesn't co. Instead, a glowing aura starts burning around Veritas, and despite her lack of leverage she starts forcing my arms apart with sheer strength.
Shit. I shouldn't have let her do that, but I can't exactly fight her while grappling soone with superpowers. My eyes catch movent above , and the third magical girl—the only one with the apparent sense to show up to this fight pre-transford—is hovering up in the sky aiming down the sights of her weird magic gun at , her mouth opening to say sothing. Alright, you know what? Two birds with one stone. Since Veritas is escaping anyway, I take a page from her teammate's book and chuck her towards the magical girl in the sky, putting her teammate directly in the firing line between us.
But without breaking her bead on , without even shifting her posture in the slightest, the girl drifts to the side before I finish my toss, getting a clear firing line on . She saw this coming. Shit.
"Fᴜʟᴍɪɴᴀɴᴛ—"
Magic circles bloom one after another in front of her weapon, power gathering in her weapon like a storm on the horizon. Should I dodge, or—no. Block. I hold up my hand to intercept the attack, my body glowing as sothing inside churns, gathering power in my palm.
"—Tʜᴜɴᴅᴇʀ!" the girl yells, and a flash of lightning overloads my optical sensors for a split second as it arcs out from her weapon and strikes my hand. There's sohow a weight to the blow, the electrical forces forcing to slide back in much the sa way the earlier shockwave did, despite the fact that the bolt never actually hit . It struck a point nearly an inch above my palm, and was stopped short.
My power reserves have dropped from 27% to 24%.
"Get her the crap out of there, Aurora!" the flying girl shouts, already moving to line up another shot. I have to return fire sohow, so I leap backwards, digging my fingers into the sidewalk and tossing chunks of concrete at the girl as hard as I can. I doubt it'll do much to magical defenses, but she doesn't have a shield like Veritas so I'm going to bet that she can't afford to just sit there and take it. Sure enough, she moves to dodge, just in ti for to spot Veritas gearing up for another attack while Aurora jumps towards her.
"No!" Aurora insists, but Veritas leaps towards anyway, still looking furious but also… a bit more determined. Rather than a full-on charge, she's hopping forward to a range where she can stab at with her weapon from a place of relative safety. A much less dangerous attack, but way harder for to try and counter.
"RETREAT, Veritas!" the flying girl shouts again. "That's an order!"
"I can do this, Minerva!" Veritas insists, striking at with a series of quick jabs I have to back away from.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringent.
"You idiot!" Aurora yells, and she thrusts her fists forward, sending the orbs of magic hovering around her directly at . Ugh, another thing to dodge! Don't I have lasers or sothing!? I feel like a robot should have lasers. I need a better ranged attack than just throwing crap! To my surprise, though, once Aurora's energy balls pass over Veritas' shoulders they imdiately drop down, reverse direction, and smack Veritas directly in the gut, yanking her backwards into Aurora's arms. The girl catches her teammate under the armpits and, despite Veritas' squawking protests, leaps away. The pair jump all the way up to the rooftops and keep running, while the flying girl—Minerva—follows after them in the sky, her weapon trained in our direction as she flees.
But she doesn't fire, and I don't pursue. The enemy combatants have been routed, and are therefore sufficiently deterred.
I disengage combat mode, starting my cooldown routines by opening a dozen different tal plates on my fra and expelling the superheated green mist that had been building up in my systems. The mana density of the air nearby briefly skyrockets when I do so, but the mist quickly disperses to the air and my readings return to normal.
"Incredible," lpone grins. "A whole team of newbies and we've already put the fear of god in them. I think I'm going to love our newest weapon, don't you agree, Thea?"
"Yes," the girl nods emphatically. "That was… what was that, inbuilt mana shielding? If I can replicate that alone, I… ohhhh my god, l, I have to figure out how she works."
Thea seems to be practically vibrating where she sits, staring at like a kid at a Christmas present.
"You know, we probably have ti to look at the anchor like you wanted," lpone hums, an amused, teasing expression on her face. Like she knows what's about to happen next.
"Screw the anchor, it'll be fine, I… I can look at it later! Co on, l, let's get ho! I need my tools, I-I need… co on, let's go!"
lpone laughs, and for once it doesn't sound cruel or mocking, but just simply happy.
"Alright, then. Co along, weapon."
I nod without really thinking about it, jumping up onto Thea's magical cargo platform and sitting down. That fight was… god. Fuck. I'm glad I didn't have to hurt anyone. Much. That's… that was good. As good as I can hope for, really.
"Haha! Oh gosh, look at her, she's sitting down like she's tired!" Thea squees. "That's so cute!"
"Mmm, yes," lpone agrees absently, glancing sidelong in my direction.
Man, if a girl told that in basically any other context I would die of happiness. Unfortunately, I am being treated like a roomba by soone who genuinely believes I basically am one. It's… well. It's depressing.
The shock of the fight kind of knocked the terror about all this out of . That and the fact that I was burning any terror I would have felt for fuel, I guess, but the point is that I've already run out of things to panic about at this stage. As existentially terrifying as the idea of being a cybernetic slave-copy of a probably dead girl is, one of the dubious advantages of this state of being is that I have quite a lot of ti to think. I've barely been like this for a few hours, but it feels like I've already had days of contemplation and coping. I've speedran through denial, anger, and bargaining to land firmly in my long-preferred category: depression.
I'm a tool of monsters that will use to hurt children. What am I going to do about it? Nothing. Obviously. Because I can't. Maybe I'll be rescued soday, but why would anybody try? I'm just a weapon. Even if the magical girls capture , they'll just turn into scrap.
I want to cry. I want to sob. But obviously, I can't do any of those things. What I can do is reoptimize my crystalline elents for sadness rather than fear, allowing to burn that emotion more efficiently. I suspect I'll likely be pretty fucking sad for the foreseeable future, so in the interest of maximizing my utility for lpone I go ahead and start the process, which…
Woah.
Jeez, y'know, maybe I shouldn't be giving up hope just yet, actually! Wow, I just… I feel a lot better all of a sudden. Ha! Eat that, sadness! Beco my fuel! Oh my god, this rocks. I can use my fucking ntal disorder to beco more powerful. Is this what antidepressants feel like? Man, no wonder Bean was always trying to get to take so. I just didn't want to because I already have to take so many pills, between the Vyvanse and the Zyrtec and the anticistamines I feel like I'm eating more dication than food. Er, felt, I guess. Now I can't eat anymore. Or take pills! Haha! I'll also probably never get to talk to Bean again in my whole life. Why am I turning blue?
"...Why is she turning blue?" Thea asks with a frown.
"Hmm?" lpone glances over to . "Oh my. Why is it turning blue?"
A blue glow emanates from inside my body, brightly emitting from the tiny cracks between my outer plates as the crystalline accents around slowly change hue. From green to blue. How interesting. Based on this and so of lpone's comnts, I feel pretty confident confirming a few important facts about magic now. Emotions create magical energy. Different emotions have different colors. Fear is green, and sadness is blue. Red is probably anger, given the context in which lpone talked about it, but I'm not sure about the other colors? What's purple, yellow, or brown? Actually, the black fog is probably concentrated magical energy, now that I'm thinking about it, so what emotion is black?
This is so neat! I get to learn about magic, see it up close and figure out how it works without anyone needing to outright tell , which is good because why talk to an object, right? Ooh, I actually almost felt that sadness there, that was a big one. I'm gonna look forward to watching my power reserves tick up!
God, this is so weird. I'm so… peppy! It's kind of terrifying, actually. I an, this is directly affecting my mind. I already knew it was going to do that, but still, it's a bit… hmm. Okay. There we go. I'm starting to feel a little more normal now.
"Maybe… maybe she sohow absorbed mana from the blue magical girl. Whatever her na was," Thea hedges, fidgeting with the webbing on her right hand while glancing awkwardly at lpone.
"Veritas," lpone reminds her. "And yes, you might be right. It's not a bad theory."
"...Yeah," Thea says softly.
"Mmm. Has this really been your first ti out of the castle in nearly a year?" lpone asks, changing the subject. "I feel rather embarrassed that I didn't notice."
"You've been busy," Thea shrugs. "We've all been busy. And, y'know, I'm trying to avoid too much miasma exposure, so staying in the castle is almost necessary these days unless I wanna take a walk on Earth which is, uh. Y'know."
"Oh, honey," lpone sighs. "You don't have to be embarrassed about what we are."
"...I'll still be attacked, though?" Thea says. "I dunno. I'm fine with staying in the castle. I'm glad I went out today, though!"
Her gaze flicks back over to , a big grin lighting up her face. I have a vague urge to smile back, but I obviously can't. Still, Thea doesn't seem too bad to . It's not her fault that she thinks I'm just an object, and I can definitely empathize with soone who doesn't want to fight. And, well, even if she doesn't think I'm a person, she's the closest I've co to being referred to as one and that's… y'know. Sothing.
I am forced to suppress another shudder, and resolve to try not to think about it. In fact, I try not to think about much of anything, and realize I have a power-saving mode. I'm not under any active orders that require to do sothing, so it's enabled, if I want it. I can just… turn off. Mostly. I'll keep a record of everything that happens around , and I'll automatically re-engage regular functions if sothing noteworthy happens, like a threat or a new order. But until then I can just… stop thinking. It's kind of a scary thought.
There's nothing I want to do more.
The next thing I know, we're back at the castle. Sowhere inside it, in fact, and though my mind automatically spools up the recorded events leading up to how I got here, I imdiately delete them in a fit of revulsion. No. I don't want to know. The whole point of this was not having to live through that ti, not having to experience it, not having to be. My mind determines there were no orders and no data relevant to better serving lpone in the given ti, and it vanishes forever. I hug myself tight, tallic fingers pressing into unyielding tallic arms as I instantly regret the decision, sha washing over for giving into the act of self-destruction.
"Still booting back up?" Thea's voice greets with a smile. "No worries. Could you get up on this table and lie down when you're ready, though?"
I look up at her, actually taking in more of the room than just 'inside the castle' this ti. It's… a fairly large room, yet it sohow still manages to seem cramped, and not just because I'm currently sitting in the sa pile of Dark World scrap tal I was brought in on. This room—almost certainly Thea's workshop, considering the sheer breadth of things I'm pretty sure are tools scattered all over the place—is fundantally ssy. The sort of ss that cos from effectively living your whole life in one room and doing everything you can to leave it as little as possible.
There are snacks and snack wrappers scattered everywhere. There are multiple bottles of water and Gatorade in various states of fullness wedged wherever Thea happened to put them down. There's a worktable with maybe twenty percent of its surface actually available to be worked on, the rest covered in various half-built chanical gizmos. And there's a larger table in the middle of the room that looks as though it was recently covered with all the random crap that appears to have been dumped unceremoniously on the floor next to it.
As I get up on the table to follow my newest order, I can't help but think about how it all looks painfully relatable.
"Alrighty!" Thea grins. "I saw so of your panels open up during the fight. Could you demonstrate their range of motion for ? Expose as much of your internals as you're able?"
"Don't damage it, Thea," lpone says flatly. Ah, right. She's in here too. Joy of joys.
"Don't worry l, I'm not going to even try to do anything complicated for a good while," Thea waves her off. "But I do need to get a feel for how she's put together."
I obligingly start moving the external panels I have access to, though most are locked in place.
"Ohhh, ho ho ho, thank you very much!" she beams. "Oh man, that is so cool! These jets—er, I guess rockets, technically—I think the thrust principles are similar to that broken engine you found three months ago. I have to learn how the inherent inefficiencies are handled in such a scaled-down version of the tech. Oh, would you get my headlamp, l?"
A rather nonplussed-looking lpone searches around the room for a mont before handing Thea a small light attached to a headband.
"I'll leave you to your work, I think," she says. "Don't dig too deep in there, alright? We don't know what could potentially be dangerous in Antipathy tech as complex as this."
"Yep yep, I'll be careful," Thea promises, waving her off. "You go take your bath already, I'm sure Nanaya already ward it up for you."
"Of course," lpone smiles slightly. "Just… don't hesitate to co to the mont you run into sothing you don't understand, alright? We can't be too careful."
"Got it," Thea agrees, grabbing sothing that looks like what a dentist would stick into a person's mouth and poking around the inside of one of my thrusters with it. Which feels extrely weird. Almost ticklish.
lpone finally departs, leaving Thea and alone. Thea continues poking away at my insides, and… yeah, honestly, the dentist comparison is apt, I think. Nothing she's doing hurts, but it's uncomfortably invasive in ways I don't really have any other good parallel for.
"God, you're beautiful," Thea mutters quietly. "I can't imagine making sothing like you. Is it possible to remove your chestplate? If I'm right, a lot of your core systems are in there, rather than in your head."
I blink. She's entirely correct. My 'brain' is in my chest, while my head just has most of the sensory suite. And, well, it's phrased as a polite question but I still get the urge to answer her question as if it was an order. I guess my compulsions are ultimately about serving the people who control , not just obeying them to the letter. That's why my own impressions of what they want matter so much; in order to serve to the best of my ability, I must understand how they wish to be served.
I reach out and gently grab Thea's hand, causing her to flinch and completely stop moving. I wait to see if she's going to tell to let go, but she doesn't say anything, so I use her hand to guide her tool towards the chanical locking chanisms underneath the edges of my chestplate that need to be flipped to remove it. Four clicks later and I drop her hand. Thea, blushing a deep brown, grabs my tal boobs—
Man, that is a deeply weird sensation. It's nothing at all like the feeling of touching my normal flesh-and-blood boobs (RIP my titties may god rest their soul) and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I guess in this situation it's good; considering my position as a slave, it's probably for the best that I'm physically incapable of experiencing anything like sex.
Hahaha, oh god. That thought alone bumped my power reserves by four percent. Sadness is so much more efficient than fear.
—and carefully removes my chestplate, revealing the guts of the magitech inside. I already knew more or less what I looked like underneath all the tal; I have my schematics inside my head, after all, though admittedly not the context to understand most of them. Still, the experience of watching soone lift my chest off of my body and expose the utter lack of flesh and blood underneath is deeply, deeply dysphoric in a way I haven't felt since I first learned the word.
But then I rember that the chestplate can just as easily be put back on, returned to where it belongs once the need for its absence has passed, and I feel a lot better. The tech itself… well. If it wasn't my current prison, I could definitely see it being pretty cool.
"Woah," Thea breathes, staring at everything. "This is you, huh? Wow. That's… that's incredible. So these crystals must be… power storage? But where does the stored power co from, that's the question. How is the magic getting in there…"
She rummages around the room, gathering a few similar-looking boxy devices and planting them on the table around . Then, she dips two fingers into the pages of her book, passing through them like water before erging with a glowing green strand attaching the book to the tips of those fingers, which she places on one of the crystals inside my chest. I spot a couple magic circles flicker briefly into being as she does it, but the magic happens without her speaking any words.
Good to know that's possible.
"Huh. I'm not feeling any pathways leading in," Thea mutters to herself. She looks… really worried about sothing all of a sudden. "Maybe there's just no intake right now. But you must have needed an insane amount of blue mana to change the color configuration of your crystal structures like that. How… hmm. Actually, uh, can I just ask you to demonstrate how you obtain more power?"
You can and that makes it an order. Except… hmm. I generate power by burning my own emotions, I'm pretty sure, but weapons aren't supposed to have emotions. I can't… it would contradict lpone's wishes for to indicate that I have any, then, wouldn't it? That's probably why she was emphasizing Thea to not go too deep. Because she didn't want Thea to find out that I'm more than just a tool.
But who am I kidding, really? I'm not more than a tool. Not anymore. I'm not a human, I'm not a person, I'm just a thing to be used. I may as well get used to it. This is my life now.
Thea takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, removing her fingers from the crystal in my chest. The light attaching them to her to fades away, and she takes a second breath, this one just as careful and calming as the first. She snaps her to shut, heads over to the door to her room, shuts it, and locks it. She walks back over to , and with surprising deftness, reattaches my chestplate. I feel an unexpected burst of relief from being once again complete. And frankly, while boob plate is a little garish, I appreciate having it all the sa. It's small, but it helps personify as not just a robot, but a female one. A woman. As useless as that is, I still like it.
Thea takes a third deep breath, this ti letting it out in a fairly loud huff. She looks anxious all of a sudden. Perhaps she found sothing dangerous inside . I've gotten the impression that most Dark World tech is pretty dangerous.
"Get up," she orders , and I do. She walks over to a half-buried chair in her room, unearths it, and drops it next to the table. "Sit here."
She reconfigures the devices on the table to point towards the chair, then sits in another chair across from as I move to obey her. I start to get that revolting feeling of failure pooling in my chest, fighting with what I think might be hope.
Thea raises her left hand, a flat expression on her face, and makes a peace sign.
"Copy this hand configuration," she orders, and I do, mirroring her. She makes a fist.
"Copy this hand configuration," she orders again, and I do. She makes a peace sign again.
"If you want to," she prefaces, "copy this hand configuration."
I freeze. I… I want to. I want to. But I can't move. A weapon doesn't want things, and lpone's orders supersede Thea's. Thea's expression doesn't change, but she glances down at the devices she has pointed at .
She makes a fist, which I'm already doing because of the order I previously had to follow.
"If you want to," she says, "retain this hand configuration."
My mind freezes. I… I can't… how do I…? I can't want to do this, or at least I can't appear to want to do this, but if I don't want to do this, then I have to make so other hand sign, right? But what do I make? Anything works, right? Anything works. Anything works. Anything as long as it isn't…
I move one knuckle, very slightly. Enough for Thea to notice, but no more. I don't… I don't know what else to do. I think I'm starting to panic.
"Fuck," Thea hisses. "Fuck, fuck, fuck. Okay. Um…"
She gets up and rummages around her room for a bit, returning with a sheet of paper and a pencil. She puts them down in front of .
"Draw a smiling face," she orders. I start drawing a smiley face, and realize that I've made the head a perfect circle. I can do that now. That's cool. I make the eyes circles too and try not to think about any of this or what it ans. Just follow the orders. Just follow the orders. I have to.
Thea looks at the page and flips it over.
"Draw anything you want," she orders , and I do nothing. I have no choice but to do nothing. Please, please, please see through this. Please, god please. Help . Help !
"Draw sothing," Thea orders next. No 'draw what you want,' just draw sothing. After a mont's hesitation, I draw a circle. And then a smaller circle inside that. And then I start filling the space between the circles with the symbols that appeared when Thea cast her barrier spell. Thea says nothing, just watching and waiting. I pass the paper to her when I'm done, without really thinking about it. She takes it, and stares at the circle for a while before putting the paper down and staring at for a mont. Then, she collects one of the little boxes she had pointed at , tapping a few buttons on it and seemingly scrolling through a small screen.
Eventually, she puts the device down and lets out a ragged breath.
"I don't… I don't know how to prove if sothing is sapient or not," she mutters. "I an, it's impossible, right? Any consciousness other than your own is inherently unprovable. But she's definitely…"
She pauses, and then sits up straighter, looking in the eyes.
"You," she corrects herself, "are definitely generating your own emotions. And as far as I understand the taphysics, I'm pretty sure that ans you have a soul."
I do nothing. I say nothing. I can't.
"You feel things," she says. "I have no idea how. This is… completely beyond . But you're a robot that feels things. You're a sentient AI. And…"
She glances at her little tal box again.
"...And based on these readings, you're having a pretty bad ti with the whole existing thing, aren't you?" she sighs. "So I need to find a way to fix that."
She glances away, a grimace on her face.
"I'm not really sure how to do that," she admits.
I… I don't know what to do. I don't know what to think. I feel… wretched. Like I've just gotten the worst sickness of my life. Thea figured out, and so I failed. But still. This is… this is hope. This could be sothing huge. This could fix everything, but unfortunately, just like Thea, I don't know exactly how.
And I guess even if I did, I still couldn't tell her.
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