4. Teardown (Patreon)

A/N: Sorry for the delay, enjoy the chapter!

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 frame 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 elements 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 time; 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 momentum at time 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 method 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 time to think about it. The world isn't quite moving in slow motion, per se, but a split second is still a lot of time for me to think all of a sudden. It is not, unfortunately, a lot of time 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 outcomes based on how Veritas adjusts. She's performing a high-momentum, 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 movement, 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 Melpomene's order. 

I shift my head to the side at the last moment, 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 frame would be like crashing face-first into a wall, and that might give her a concussion. I redirect the momentum instead, trying to toss her away from Melpomene but also away from anything she could crash into. 

She squawks with surprise and tries to bash me 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 momentum before leaping right back at me a second time with more or less the same attack, charging directly at me with the tip of her weapon. And I mean, 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. But what I do have experience with is fighting video games. Now, 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 some crazy fighting game attacks, I'm well aware that is not how real life combat works. But I know at least a little bit about the mental part of a fight. And my instincts there are telling me I have two options. 

The first is to do exactly the same thing I did before. Veritas, after all, is attacking with a method that literally just failed to work. There's nothing stopping me 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 me into committing to something 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 times 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 me to go with the first option and hope that my reaction times allow me 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 mean 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 same way as before, stepping just enough to the side so I can grab her as her momentum forces her to overextend. And again, I get a fistful of her shirt—

A normal shirt would immediately rip under these forces. This outfit is conjured and reinforced by magic.

—and toss her away from Melpomene, twisting her body so she can't try to strike me with her shield this time. Hehe. Get rotated, idiot. 

Man, I should really not be spending mental 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 me 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 me 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 momentum to snap her neck, guaranteeing her death by paralyzing her heart and likely giving me enough time 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 memory 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 me. It didn't feel like some 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 engagement my master desires. 

Melpomene is right. I'm not a person. I am a weapon.

Veritas is crashing down diagonally towards me, 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 me. I open the thruster compartments 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 me just a day ago. I twist around, stopping myself much the same 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 me, 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 me 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!" Melpomene 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 mean, 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," Melpomene tells Veritas, staring down at us with a self-satisfied smile. "It's a bit embarrassing to watch. Of course, even if you had some degree of competence, you would have lost the moment you let me rile you up." 

Veritas' eyes go wide, freezing her struggles for a split second out of shock and, I'm fairly sure, shame. 

"You're blue, not red," Melpomene presses, her smile slowly twisting from amusement to an almost offended sneer. "Anger isn't your emotion. If you can't even remember 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 Melpomene 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," Melpomene hums. "She likely has a lot of information on the current movements 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 something 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 pavement below. 

The flying girl is, obviously, a magical girl. She's got an extremely 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 me 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 something 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 costume, 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.

"Remember the plan!" the already-transformed 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, something else starts forming over her hands: an extra set of fingerless gloves, dangerous-looking protrusions emerging from the knuckles. They glow slightly after manifesting into being, and in front of them two orbs of light emerge, 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 me it's actually close enough to push me 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 Melpomene'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 me? This is a child. 

"¡Fᴜᴇʀᴢᴀ Aʀᴅɪᴇɴᴛᴇ!" Aurora screams, and I brace myself for an attack that doesn't come. 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 someone with superpowers. My eyes catch movement above me, and the third magical girl—the only one with the apparent sense to show up to this fight pre-transformed—is hovering up in the sky aiming down the sights of her weird magic gun at me, her mouth opening to say something. 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 me, without even shifting her posture in the slightest, the girl drifts to the side before I finish my toss, getting a new bead on me. 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 something inside me 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 somehow a weight to the blow, the electrical forces forcing me to slide back in much the same way the earlier shockwave did, despite the fact that the bolt never actually hit me. 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 somehow, 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 time for me to spot Veritas gearing up for another attack while Aurora jumps towards her. 

"No!" Aurora insists, but Veritas leaps towards me 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 me with her weapon from a place of relative safety. A much less dangerous attack, but way harder for me to try and counter. 

"RETREAT, Veritas!" the flying girl shouts again. "That's an order!"

"I can do this, Minerva!" Veritas insists, striking at me with a series of quick jabs I have to back away from.

"You idiot!" Aurora yells, and she thrusts her fists forward, sending the orbs of magic hovering around her directly at me. Ugh, another thing to dodge! Don't I have lasers or something!? 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 immediately 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 metal plates on my frame 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," Melpomene 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, Mel, I have to figure out how she works."

Thea seems to be practically vibrating where she sits, staring at me like a kid at a Christmas present. 

"You know, we probably have time to look at the anchor like you wanted," Melpomene 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! Come on, Mel, let's get home! I need my tools, I-I need… come on, let's go!" 

Melpomene laughs, and for once it doesn't sound cruel or mocking, but just simply happy. 

"Alright, then. Come 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," Melpomene agrees absently, glancing sidelong in my direction. 

Man, if a girl told me that in basically any other context I would die of happiness. Unfortunately, I am being treated like a roomba by someone 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 me. 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 time 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 me to hurt children. What am I going to do about it? Nothing. Obviously. Because I can't. Maybe I'll be rescued someday, but why would anybody try? I'm just a weapon. Even if the magical girls capture me, they'll just turn me 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 elements for sadness rather than fear, allowing me 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 Melpomene 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! Become my fuel! Oh my god, this rocks. I can use my fucking mental disorder to become more powerful. Is this what antidepressants feel like? Man, no wonder Bean was always trying to get me to take some. 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 medication 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?" Melpomene glances over to me. "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 me slowly change hue. From green to blue. How interesting. Based on this and some of Melpomene's comments, 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 Melpomene 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 me, 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 mean, 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 somehow absorbed mana from the blue magical girl. Whatever her name was," Thea hedges, fidgeting with the webbing on her right hand while glancing awkwardly at Melpomene. 

"Veritas," Melpomene 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 time out of the castle in nearly a year?" Melpomene 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," Melpomene 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 me, 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 me. It's not her fault that she thinks I'm just an object, and I can definitely empathize with someone who doesn't want to fight. And, well, even if she doesn't think I'm a person, she's the closest I've come to being referred to as one and that's… y'know. Something. 

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 me to do something, so it's enabled, if I want it. I can just… turn off. Mostly. I'll keep a record of everything that happens around me, and I'll automatically re-engage regular functions if something 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. Somewhere inside it, in fact, and though my mind automatically spools up the recorded events leading up to how I got here, I immediately 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 time, not having to experience it, not having to be. My mind determines there were no orders and no data relevant to better serving Melpomene in the given time, and it vanishes forever. I hug myself tight, metallic fingers pressing into unyielding metallic arms as I instantly regret the decision, shame washing over me for giving into the act of self-destruction. 

"Still booting back up?" Thea's voice greets me 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 time. It's… a fairly large room, yet it somehow still manages to seem cramped, and not just because I'm currently sitting in the same pile of Dark World scrap metal 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 fundamentally messy. The sort of mess that comes 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 mechanical 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 some of your panels open up during the fight. Could you demonstrate their range of motion for me? Expose as much of your internals as you're able?" 

"Don't damage it, Thea," Melpomene says flatly. Ah, right. She's in here too. Joy of joys. 

"Don't worry Mel, 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 me my headlamp, Mel?"

A rather nonplussed-looking Melpomene searches around the room for a moment 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 warmed it up for you." 

"Of course," Melpomene smiles slightly. "Just… don't hesitate to come to me the moment you run into something you don't understand, alright? We can't be too careful." 

"Got it," Thea agrees, grabbing something 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 extremely weird. Almost ticklish. 

Melpomene finally departs, leaving Thea and I 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 something 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 me, 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 me to let go, but she doesn't say anything, so I use her hand to guide her tool towards the mechanical locking mechanisms 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 metal 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 metal; I have my schematics inside my head, after all, though admittedly not the context to understand most of them. Still, the experience of watching someone 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 remember 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 come 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 me. Then, she dips two fingers into the pages of her book, passing through them like water before emerging 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 something 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 Melpomene's wishes for me 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 tome fades away, and she takes a second breath, this one just as careful and calming as the first. She snaps her tome shut, heads over to the door to her room, shuts it, and locks it. She walks back over to me, 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 same. It's small, but it helps personify me 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 time letting it out in a fairly loud huff. She looks anxious all of a sudden. Perhaps she found something dangerous inside me. I've gotten the impression that most Dark World tech is pretty dangerous. 

"Get up," she orders me, 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 me 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 Melpomene's orders supersede Thea's. Thea's expression doesn't change, but she glances down at the devices she has pointed at me. 

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 some 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 me. 

"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 means. 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 me, and I do nothing. I have no choice but to do nothing. Please, please, please see through this. Please, god please. Help me. Help me! 

"Draw something," Thea orders next. No 'draw what you want,' just draw something. After a moment'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 me for a moment. Then, she collects one of the little boxes she had pointed at me, 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 something is sapient or not," she mutters. "I mean, 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 me in the eyes. 

"You," she corrects herself, "are definitely generating your own emotions. And as far as I understand the metaphysics, I'm pretty sure that means 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 me. But you're a robot that feels things. You're a sentient AI. And…"

She glances at her little metal box again. 

"...And based on these readings, you're having a pretty bad time 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 me out, and so I failed. But still. This is… this is hope. This could be something 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.